on their store-ships, just below Canton. The Chinese had
repeatedly appealed to the British Government to stop these imports,
but the British Government had turned a persistently deaf ear.
Therefore the Emperor determined to deal with the matter on his own
account. He sent a powerful official named Lin to attend to it, and Lin
had a sort of Boston Tea Party, as we have said, and destroyed some
twenty thousand chests of opium in a very drastic way. Mr. H. Wells
Williams describes it thus: "The opium was destroyed in the most
thorough manner, by mixing it in parcels of 200 chests, in trenches,
with lime and salt water, and then drawing off the contents into an
adjacent creek at low tide."

After this atrocity, followed the first Opium War, when British ships
sailed up the river, seized port after port, and bombarded and took
Canton. Her ships sailed up the Yangtsze, and captured the tribute
junks going up the Grand Canal with revenue to Peking, thus stopping a
great part of China's income. Peace was concluded in 1843, and Great
Britain came out well. She recompensed herself by taking the island of
Hongkong; an indemnity of 21 million dollars, and Canton, Amoy,
Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai were opened up as "treaty ports"--for the
importation of opium and the "open-door" in general.

Mr. Wells, in his "Middle Kingdom" describes the origin of this first
war with England: "This war was extraordinary in its origin as growing
chiefly out of a commercial misunderstanding; remarkable in its course
as being waged between strength and weakness, conscious superiority and
ignorant pride; melancholy in its end as forcing the weaker to pay for
opium within its borders against all its laws, thus paralyzing the
little moral power its feeble government could exert to protect its
subjects.... It was a turning point in the national life of the Chinese
race, but the compulsory payment of six million dollars for the opium
destroyed has left a stigma upon the English name."

He also says, "The conflict was now fairly begun; its issue between the
parties so unequally matched--one having almost nothing but the right
on its side, the other assisted by every material and physical
advantage--could easily be foreseen" and again, after speaking of it
as being unjust and immoral, he concludes "Great Britain, the first
Christian power, really waged this war against the pagan monarch who
had only endeavored to put down a vice harmful to his people. T