Lin Zexu
Lin Zexu destroyed 1,000 tonnes of British opium at Canton in 1839 and was exiled to Xinjiang for the war that followed. He was a scholar-official of the most orthodox kind — a jinshi degree at twenty-seven, a career in provincial administration, and a reputation for incorruptibility so complete that he was called Lin the Clear Sky. The opium problem he was sent to solve was fiscal as much as moral. British merchants were selling Indian opium into China through Canton in quantities that had reversed the flow of silver, and the imperial court's debate was between legalising and taxing it or suppressing it absolutely. The Daoguang emperor chose suppression and sent Lin as imperial commissioner in 1839. He arrested Chinese dealers, closed the dens, demanded that the foreign merchants surrender their stock, and when they refused, confined them to their factories until they did. Some 20,000 chests were dissolved in lime and salt in trenches, over twenty-three days, with Lin writing an apology to the god of the sea for the pollution. He also wrote to Queen Victoria asking how a country that banned opium at home could permit its sale abroad. The letter was never delivered. Britain sent a fleet, and the Chinese coastal defences were destroyed within a year. Lin was blamed for provoking it, dismissed and exiled to Ili. He spent the exile studying western geography and weaponry and arguing that China would have to learn from the people who had beaten it. He was recalled from exile in 1845 and died in 1850 on his way to suppress the Taiping rising. Statues of him stand in Chinese cities and in Chinatown in New York, and the destruction of the opium is commemorated as the beginning of the century of humiliation.
- Lived: 1785 CE – 1850 CE
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: imperial_commissioner, statesman, reformer
