For the East India Company, the opium trade was crucial to its solvency and yielded it some £2 million a year. By the early 1800s, it was the leading source of revenue for the Company. But it was also the second-largest one for the government of British India after land taxes, regularly contributing more than 15 percent of the total.42 And taxes on tea back in Britain, which the opium effectively purchased, were adding at least £3 million annually to the coffers of the Exchequer, nearly 10 percent of the revenue from the whole of England.43 That amount covered half of the expenses of the mighty Royal Navy, which dominated the globe’s seas.44
The opium trade was too important to stop—or allow to be stopped.
However, that is exactly what the Chinese emperor—officially, “Son of Heaven and Lord of Ten Thousand Years”—tried to do. He appointed a special emissary to Canton, the morally upright Lin Zexu. (His nickname was Blue Sky, referring to his supposedly clear and incorruptible nature.)45 Lin made sixteen hundred arrests, closed the channel that led to Canton, effectively blockading the port, and publically destroyed some twenty thousand chests of opium held in foreign warehouses. It took workers three weeks to dissolve 3 million pounds of the drug in pits and watch it be swept out to sea by the currents.46
In response, Britain launched a war to force the Chinese to open their ports to the trade. The First Opium War (1839–42) was a prolonged, intermittent, and lopsided affair, with Britain’s superior weapons crushing the emperor’s far more numerous troops, who carried muskets, flintlocks, pikes, and bows and arrows. Lin, scapegoat for the humiliating defeat, was recalled to Peking and sentenced to death. “You have been no better than a wooden doll,” the emperor told him.47*
The Treaty of Nanking, ending the First Opium War, resulted in the opening of five ports for foreign trade: Canton, Amoy, Foochow (Fuzhou), Ningpo (Ninbo), and Shanghai. As well, China ceded Hong Kong, then a minor outpost, where British citizens were exempt from Chinese jurisdiction and would be held accountable by their own laws rather than local ones. It also included an indemnity payment to Britain of $21 million, about half of China’s total tax revenues for the year, to cover war costs and compensation to traders for the destroyed opium. China, though, refused to legalize opium, and Henry Pottinger, who negotiated the treaty for the British, did not insist. Opium is not mentioned anywhere in the document.
While tea imports to Britain jumped from 32 million pounds in 1834 to 56.5 million pounds by 1846,48 the terms of the treaty, and their protracted implementation, did not appease the British for long. With several of the key points disputed, they launched the Second Opium War in 1856. They handily won this, too, and burned down the vast and sumptuous imperial Summer Palace in spiteful vengeance. Not unexpectedly, the new treaty reached further with British demands. The victors demanded all ports be opened, British goods be exempt from import duties, foreigners be allowed to travel across the country, missionaries given free and unrestricted right to spread Christianity, and the establishment of a full embassy in Peking (Beijing) with a British diplomat in residence. Another large indemnity payment was also stipulated—and continued access to China’s tea. “It secures us a few round millions of dollars and no end of very refreshing tea,” the Illustrated London News happily reported.49
And this time, opium was to be completely legalized.
On the eve of the First Opium War, some forty thousand chests of the drug—about 5.5 million pounds—had been shipped to China;50 within two decades after the Second Opium War, the opium trade had more than doubled. Imports hit 93,000 chests in 1872 and 112,000 chests—nearly 16 million pounds—a decade later.51
By the time the British had launched the First Opium War in 1839, though, the East India Company had begun intensively searching for other sources of their national addiction: tea. Under public pressure demanding cheaper tea, the Crown broke the Company’s long-running monopoly on importing it in 1833. The first non-Company consignment of tea shipped out of China was by Jardine, Matheson & Co., the largest and most famous of the opium merchants.*
The East India Company scrambled to find a place where it could dictate not just the price but all aspects of production. After decades of ignoring rumors and reports that tea had been found growing in India, the Company could no longer wait.
* In Britain, the legendary soldier Robert Clive was one of the most famous casualties of opium, and his suicide at forty-nine is blamed on his addiction to the drug and years of steadily increasing dosages for a stomach ailment.
* Lin had his sentence commuted to exile in the farthest northwestern hinterlands of Xinjiang. He returned some years later, though, forgiven and with his reputation somewhat resurrected; today he is a national hero and symbol of Chinese resistance to European imperialism.
* It and its Scottish founders were models for James Clavell in his novels Tai-Pan and Noble House. Today, Jardine Matheson is a highly respected Fortune Global 500 company.
CHAPTER 4
An Indian Tea Industry
The northeastern section of India hangs like a limb between Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, and Myanmar (Burma), a lazy-T-shaped expanse connected to the rest of the country by a slender 125-mile-long strip of land called the Siliguri Corridor. (Colloquially, and more evocatively, it’s known as the Chicken’s Neck). Stretching to the foothills of the eastern Himalayas, Assam—now the area’s central state and, until recently, the name for the entire region—is largely at low elevation, hot, and tropical. The mighty Brahmaputra River cleaves Assam in half with a four-hundred-mile-long valley as it slithers southwest toward the Bay of Bengal. Altering its path and shifting its braided strands from year to year, the river widens to a dozen miles in places.
In 1823, Robert Bruce, a Scottish adventurer, explorer, and businessman, was trading along the upper Brahmaputra Valley when he came across indigenous tea growing in the dense jungle. Local Singpho tribes pickled the leaves and ate them with oil and garlic and sometimes dried fish, much in the manner of the Burmese dish lahpet, which is still popular today. The Singphos also made a primitive tea with the leaves.
Bruce befriended a Singpho chief named Bisa Gam and made arrangements to get some tea seeds and plants. But then two events interceded. In 1824, the First Anglo-Burmese War opened in response to Assam’s being largely overrun by invading Burmese. That same year, Bruce—by then a major in the Bengal Artillery—died. His story ends abruptly, and the thread gets taken up by his younger brother, Charles Alexander (C. A.) Bruce, who was commanding a flotilla of gunboats in the area.1