Commissioner Lin, whom he selected to carry out his prohibitory policy, was a fit instrument for such a master, equally virtuous in his aims and equally tyrannical in his mode of proceeding.  Arriving at Canton, his first object was to get possession of the forbidden drug, which was stored on ships outside the harbor.  This he thought to accomplish by surrounding the whole foreign community by soldiers and threatening them with death if the opium was not promptly surrendered.  While its owners or their agents hesitated, Captain Elliot, the British Superintendent of Trade, came up from Macao, and demanded to share the duress of his nationals.  He then called on them to deliver up the drug to him to be used in the service of the Queen for the ransom of the lives of her subjects, assuring them that they would be reimbursed from the public treasury.  No fewer than twenty-one thousand chests, valued at nine million dollars, were brought in from the opium ships and formally handed over to Commissioner Lin.  The foreign community was set free, and the drug destroyed by being mixed with quicklime.

War was made to punish this outrage on the rights of the foreign community, and to exact indemnity for the seizure of their property.  Canton was not captured, but held to ransom, and the haughty Viceroy sent into exile.  Other cities were taken and held; and, in 1842, a treaty of peace was signed at Nanking by which five ports were opened to foreign trade.  The embargo on opium was not withdrawn; but the defeat of the Chinese resulted in a virtual immunity from seizure together with a growth of the traffic, such as to justify the ill-odored name which that war still bears in history.

Treaties with other powers followed in quick succession.  On demand of the French Minister, the Emperor recalled his prohibitory decrees against Christianity and issued an Edict of Toleration.  If the opening of the ports gave a stimulus to trade, the decree of toleration opened a door for missionary enterprise.  As yet, however, neither merchant nor missionary was allowed to penetrate into the interior; while the capital and the whole of the northern seacoast remained inaccessible.  This was obviously a state of things that could not be permanent; yet fifteen years were to pass before another war came to settle the terms of intercourse on a broader basis.

When the war broke out, Li Hung Chang was seventeen years of age, living at Hofei in Anhui.  As there were then no newspapers in China it may be doubted whether he heard of it until a British squadron sailed up to Nanking and extorted a treaty at the cannon’s mouth.  Li was rudely startled by the appearance of a new force, to which there was no allusion in any of his ancient books.  Along with the sailing-ships there were two or three small steamers.  It struck the Chinese with astonishment to see them make head against wind and tide. Shin Chuan, “ships of the gods,” is the name they gave those mysterious vessels.  Little could Li foresee the part he was destined to take in creating a steam navy for China.