Background Information
Below are three key points that users should understand about the opium trade in the 1830s in order to contextualize the information in this module.
1. Opium's legality: In the 1830s, opium was illegal in the Qing empire. Almost all of the opium sold in China during these years was grown in India and smuggled into south China by (primarily) British merchants. Americans and various British colonial subjects (especially the Parsee community of Bombay) were also involved in the transport trade from India to China.
2. Opium trading practices: Since at least the mid-1820s, the central location for opium transactions between British and Chinese merchants was on the island of Lintin in the Pearl River Delta near present-day Hong Kong. At the remote offshore island of Lintin, British firms permanently anchored large "receiving ships," which were stationary vessels that operated as floating warehouses. Chinese buyers would go to money-lending shops in Guangzhou (Canton) to make payment, then take a receipt out to a foreign receiving ship anchored near Lintin to receive their opium. In this way the British and Chinese merchants involved in the trade could keep their transactions out of the immediate surveillance of the high officials in Guangzhou.
3. Opium's northward migration: The Lintin system of offshore opium transactions expanded north from Guangdong province into neighboring Fujian province around 1834. This migration of the trade from the Pearl River Delta north into Fujianese ports like Xiamen and Shenhu Bay is the primary subject of this module. The date 1834 is significant because this is when the British East India Company relinquished their monopoly over British trade in China, opening the door for new British firms like Jardine-Matheson and their competitor Dent &Co. to expand the trade into new markets.
