ergetic traders in spite of official
resistance, had never exceeded two hundred chests a year. But with the
advent of the company in 1773, the trade grew. In spite of a second
Chinese prohibition in 1796, half-heartedly enforced by corrupt mandarins,
the total for 1820 was 4,000 chests. The Chinese government was faced not
only with the possibility of a race debauchery but also with an immediate
and alarming drain of silver from the country. The balance of the trade
was against them. Either as an economic or moral problem, the situation
was grave.

The smoking of opium began in China and is peculiar to the Chinese. The
Hindoos and Malays eat it. Complicated and wide-spread as the smoking
habit is to-day, it is a modern custom as time runs in China. There seems
to be little doubt in the minds of those Sinologues who have traced the
opium thread back to the tangle of early missionary reports and imperial
edicts, that the habit started either in Formosa or on the mainland across
the Straits, where malaria is common. Opium had been used, generations
before, as a remedy for malaria; and these first smokers seem to have
mixed a little opium with their tobacco, which had been introduced by the
Portuguese in the early seventeenth century. From this beginning, it would
appear, was developed the rather elaborate outfit which the opium-smoker
of to-day considers necessary to his pleasure.

Nothing but solid Anglo-Saxon persistence had enabled the company to
build up the trade. Seven years after their first small adventure, or in
1780, a depot of two small receiving hulks was established in Lark's Bay,
south of Macao. A year later the company freighted a ship to Canton, but
finding no demand were obliged to sell the lot of 1,600 chests at a loss
to Sinqua, a Canton "Hong-merchant," who, not being able to dispose of it
to advantage, reshipped it. The price in that year was $550 (Mexican) a
chest; Sinqua had paid the company only $200, but even at a bargain he
found no market. Meantime, in the words of a "memorandum," prepared by
Joshua Rowntree for the debate in parliament last year, "British merchants
spread the habit up and down the coast; opium store-ships armed as
fortresses were moored at the mouth of the Canton River."

In 1782, the company's supercargoes at Canton wrote to Calcutta: "The
importation of opium being strongly prohibited by the Chinese government,
and a business altogether new to us, it was necessary for us to t