Number of words: 389

Of course, China too had acted early to ban the importation of opium, and the laws passed in 1729 were re-enacted twice more, once in the late eighteenth century and then again in the early nineteenth century. Because of these bans, the East India Company could not formally or explicitly acknowledge that its opium was intended for the Chinese market: doing so would have meant the loss of its trading rights and the end of its immensely lucrative tea business So, in order to preserve its commercial privileges, the Company created an ingenious subterfuge. Opium from the Ghazipur and Patna factories was loaded on to heavily guarded fleets and sent to Calcutta, where it was auctioned to ‘private traders.” Thereafter the Company disclaimed all responsibility for its product, which was then transported by these traders to Whampoa (Huangpu) on the Pearl River, where they would sell the drug to Chinese smugglers.” When the Chinese authorities clamped down on Whampoa’s smuggling networks, the traffickers moved upriver to Lintin Island, at the mouth of the river, where they set up receiving boats to facilitate the distribution of opium.” From there, Chinese smugglers would whisk the drug away to the mainland, in speedy many-oared rowboats known as ‘fast crabs’ or ‘scrambling dragons.

This meant that the traders’ ships were empty of opium when they reached the first Chinese customs post and they could plausibly claim that they were trading only in legal goods. They would then  proceed upriver to the East India Company’s factory, in Guangzhou’s Foreign Enclave, where they would hand over their silver in exchange for a bill’, or promissory note, that could be redeemed in London and some other major cities.” This ingenious system thus transformed a plant product, forcibly extracted from Indian peasants, into an item whose value kept multiplying as it was siphoned through China towards the West.” The bills issued by the Company, and by banks like Baring Brothers in London, were the crucial instrument that tied together the entire system of commodity trade, ranging from cotton produced by enslaved African Americans to opium supplied by Indian peasants. The functioning of this system of purportedly free trade thus depended crucially on enslavement, coerced labour, smuggling and black markets.

Excerpted from Pages 74 to 75 of Smoke And Ashes: A Journey Through Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh