How This Queen Became the Biggest Drug Lord

Hmm. A sigh escapes you. As you open the doors and a smell like honey and flowers creeps up your nostrils. On low beds, men sprawl amidst cushions, smiling serenely through the haze. A young woman hands you a tray with dim sum, tea and a pipe, your usual. With the first hit of opium, the edges of your world soften and your guilt evaporates in a warm, weightless cloud. Just today, foreign merchants bribed you smuggling in the very stuff now curling through your lungs. We're in China around 1839 and this year 40,000 chests of opium will flow through the port of Guangzhou, making the dealers fabulously rich. And you are a willing accomplice to the world's biggest narco-king pin, the British Empire. But how did Queen Victoria become the head of a drug cartel? All the tea in China. It started innocently. By the late 18th century, the British got hopelessly hooked on tea. Within a century demand for energising leaf water exploded by 10,000% with tea taxes funding 10% of the entire treasury. The problem is, the world's only tea dealer at the time is China, which sees itself as the centre of civilisation and doesn't care for equal partnerships. Then negotiation partner couldn't be more irritated. It's the British East India Company. A huge joint stock company with a state-backed monopoly on trade in the Indian Ocean and a private army twice as big as the British Empire's. For now, they are the ones being squeezed. The Chinese demand silver for tea and don't buy anything themselves, a losing deal that drains the crowns' silver reserves. So, in 1793, London sends ambassadors, hoping fancy words and gifts can nudge Beijing into buying British goods. But the Chianglong Emperor tells them to get lost. Our celestial empire possesses all things in prolific abundance. There is no need to import the manufacturers of outside barbarians. Desperately, British officials look for something anything they can sell to China, and they identify opium. Hey, hope you're enjoying this story. 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In the late 1700s, they start forcing farmers to swap food crops for poppy fueling famines that kill millions. Like any good cartel, they then launder the business and sell the opium to private merchants in Calcutta who smuggle it into China. Trade runs like butter and Chinese silver starts running into British money chests so fast that it becomes the empire's financial backbone within a few decades. And in 1833, the floodgates open. The British government ends the East India Company's China monopoly. Ambitious British merchants turn into reckless narco lords with armed smuggling boats who push the drug into a mass market habit. More and more people get high and many get addicted, although Chinese officials might have overstated numbers to throw shade on this foreign drug. Country to later myths, most users may have used it like many Europeans use wine or beer, socially and in moderation. To the Chinese government, it's less a public health than an economic crisis. They're bleeding more silver out through opium and other imports than tea in the like bring in. As recession grips the empire, officials use opium as a scapegoat for fading morals and fortitude and decide to crush the trade. And the stage for this showdown is Guangzhou, the heart of the drug hustle known to Europeans as Canton. The Untouchable. It's spring 1839 in the buzzing port city and you're on your way to get high with your merchant powers again. You're sweating as you stroll through the narrow street that smell of incense tea and frying food. But as you reach the den, the doors have been smashed to splinters. Soldiers are dragging the owner away while others haul out armfuls of confiscated pipes. As a middleman who's been pocketing mountains of British silver, you feel the noose tightening around your neck. The man responsible rolled into town only a week ago. Lins or Shu, the emperor's hand-picked fixer for the opium crisis, an elite scholar known as clear as the heavens for being incorruptible in a system drowning in bribes. From the outside, China's huge army, population and sentry old dynasty look like a massive porcelain vase, pristine and imposing. But it's just as delicate if hit hard. A population boom has outpaced food supply and bureaucracy, the economy is in freefall and rebellions are simmering. But to Lin, China remains civilization's eternal center, self-sufficient and morally superior. And in that view, emergent like you getting rich off bribes from barbarians is the absolute worst. You see Lin's decree pinned to every wall, ditch the habit in about a year or prepare for the executioner. And you hear whispers of what Lin said when the biggest Chinese opium trader, one of the richest men in the world, tried to bribe him with a fortune. The great minister does not want your money. I want your head. And Lin isn't stopping here. He turns to the source of the opium flood, the foreign traders. They live on a narrow strip outside Guangzhou's walls known as the factories, a mix of offices, warehouses and living quarters they lease from China. And the only place in the empire where foreigners can legally live and trade, designed to keep them under control. The British operation is overseen by superintendent Charles Elliott, a beautiful servant to the crown. He personally finds the opium smuggling a bit distasteful, but gets its economic necessity and lacks the legal authority to stop it anyway. Lin sends them an ultimatum. Surrender all your opium and pledge never to trade it again or else. His soldiers brick up the doors, march through the streets and cut off food supplies. This escalated quickly and with messages between China and London taking months, Elliott panics and makes a fateful decision. He orders the traders to hand over all 20,283 opium chests, promising that the crown will pay them back. They can hardly believe their luck. In one stroke, their entire stock is sold. She might not know it yet, but this makes Queen Victoria the biggest drug lord on the planet. Elliott doesn't realise the world altering debt he just created for her. The opium is worth 4% of the entire British state budget. Today, that share would be about 55 billion pounds close to the UK's defence budget. Lin meanwhile is riding high. He alone stopped the crisis and seized the opium. Chest after chest is hauled to huge trenches by the river dumped into brine mixed with lime and flushed out to the sea. The bill, please. By August 1839, the news reaches London and buries the foreign ministers desk under a mountain of letters from merchants all asking for the Queen to pay their IOUs. The most powerful merchants launch a lobbying campaign arguing that China's market is a gold mine locked behind in a nine bureaucracy just waiting for liberation. In October, the cabinet decides to send warships to force the Chinese to pay, seize ports, and crack the country open like an oyster for British commerce. This causes a moral backlash across Britain, but the fleet is already off to declare war on one third of the world's population. Steel ships meet sabers. In June 1840, fishing boats off Hong Kong start spotting strange shapes on the horizon that slowly grow into 22 warships and dozens of transports carrying about 4,000 British and Indian troops. Lin Zashul isn't impressed. He's dismissed reports of an incoming fleet and tells the emperor it's just a bunch of smugglers. Charles Elliott knows better. Forced out of Guangzhou months ago, he's been fighting desperate naval skirmishes for food and water along the coast hoping for reinforcement. He teams up with the admiral leaves at attachment to blockade Guangzhou and sails the main force north. In July, they reach the archipelago of Jushan and start bombarding the mainland. Its army falls in just nine minutes and nearly a million people flee in a panic while the disgraced local governor drowns himself in a small pool. While China has an army of 800,000, it's scattered across an empire larger than Europe and the technology gap is huge. For centuries, the Qing had prioritized internal stability while the world outside raced through industrial revolution. So now they're still fighting with their great-great-grandfather's weapons, cannons from the 1500s, rusty old flint locks, and literally bows and spears. Still, the real mismatch is at sea. Britain is a global naval superpower while the weak Qing navy has been neglected and years earlier had even struggled to crush local pirates like the armada of pirate queen Zheng Yi-Sao. By August, the British fleet is dangerously close to Beijing. Terrified, the Dagoong Emperor fires Lin Zishu, blaming him for the crisis and opens negotiations with Ariat. But after months of back and forth, Ariat's patience snaps. The British deployed the world's first steam-powered iron warship, the Nemesis. Like a tank at a cavalry battle, it vaporizes eleven warjunks in 90 minutes. The horrified Chinese diplomat agrees to hand over Hong Kong and a lot of money on top to make it stop. But neither side is happy with this result. The Chinese negotiator is sentenced to death and Eliot fired for not demanding more. In August to 1841, a newcomer arrives with reinforcements. They go north again, dismantling the coastal defenses. On July 21st to 1842, in brutal heat, thousands of British troops step off their ships and after a short, vicious fight, they break in and enter the city of Zhengjiang and walk into a nightmare. People are cutting each other's throat or drowning themselves in garden pools to escape the barbarians. The war machine pushes on for Nanjing and aims their cannons at the heart of the ancient capital. On August 29th, 1842, Chinese officials board a British warship to sign the Treaty of Nanjing. China is forced to pay six million silver dollars for the destroyed opium and another 15 million dollars for ransoms, debts and to repair and refuel the very ships that just slaughtered their people. In total, it's a fiscal shock worth about half of China's annual income. Hong Kong is made a permanent colony and five ports are forced open, dismantling China's control of foreign trade. Observedly, opium is not discussed at all and stays technically illegal because the British crown wants to avoid looking like a Victorian Pablo Escobar. But actions speak louder than words. The century of humiliation. After Nanjing, opium flooded China like a tsunami, while western merchants got their tea and profits. In 1856, tensions bowled over into the second opium war, ending with more unequal treaties that stripped China's control over trade, law and land even further. Opium was legalized and smoking spread more than ever. But this is not the story of a bully and a helpless victim. The Qing were rulers of a massive expansionist empire themselves that took much of Asia by force, including Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan. The opium wars were more like two of the most powerful empires on earth facing off, for which ordinary people paid the price. In 1912, the Qing Empire shattered, ending 2,000 years of domestic rule and sparking decades of civil war that only concluded with Mao taking power in 1949. By then, both China and the West had their own versions of the story. In the West, opium was recast as an oriental drug that was consumed in city places by dangerous criminals. In China, opium became the foreign poison destroying the nation. The Communist Party turned this memory into the opening chapter of the centre of humiliation, fueling nationalism and presenting its own rise as the answer to that suffering, stories that still impact global politics today.