After entering 1820, the Qing government became more and more prosperous. On the one hand, the peasant revolts in China continued one after another, and the Qing government was busy dealing with the situation and was overwhelmed. On the other hand, the Western powers have quietly begun to invade China, the Western colonists led by Britain have planted many poppies in colonial India, and made opium poppies and sold them to China through refining technology.
It should be said that this poppy actually appeared in China a long time ago, but at that time it was used as a medicinal material. The method of use is to crush it and take it with water. Because the taste is more bitter, plus this medicine is not produced in our country, it must be transported from Central Asia, the price has always been high, so there are fewer people who use it, this thing only exists among the nobility. Later, it was found that this stinky baking thing was equipped with a smoking gun and a smoke lamp, and it would produce a strong sense of anesthesia, which would cause people to have strange hallucinations, so all the stupid children who had a little money in the family began to smoke. From 1820 to 1838, the number of boxes of opium in China increased from more than 4,000 to more than 40,000, a tenfold increase. Britain, which has always been in a trade deficit with China, suddenly became a trade surplus, and British businessmen gradually found that since small gadgets such as cloth could not open the Chinese market, they could only rely on opium to make money.
In order to continue to expand the profit margin, opium dealers sell differently according to the color of the goods. For example, if you say that the price of a slightly better color is more expensive, the people who sell it are only for the children of bureaucrats; those with poor color are sold to civilians at a low price. As a result, the opium dealers made a lot of money, and the silver accumulated by the Qing government over the years was lost at a rate visible to the naked eye. At that time, the government's attitude toward the sale of opium was also ambiguous, and anti-smuggling officials always colluded with opium dealers not to investigate such contraband, and even participated in the opium business. Lin Zexu saw the depth of the opium poison, and he believed that if opium was not banned, China would no longer be able to resist foreign enemies, and the imperial court would fall into a heavy crisis.
The Daoguang Emperor agreed with Lin Zexu's statement, so he sent him to Guangdong to serve as a minister of Chincha, specifically responsible for the anti-smoking matter. After Lin Zexu arrived in Guangdong, he ordered the lawbreakers in the thirteen lines of Guangzhou to hand over opium. At first they thought it was Lin Zexu's trick of filial piety to them, but later they found that this governor was different from other officials. Foreigners who are soft will come hard if they can't, so they threaten Lin Zexu with foreign guns and artillery. Lin Zexu besieged the foreigners who did not hand over opium in the embassy, cutting off water and food forcing them to hand over opium. After many days, the exhausted opium dealers finally obediently handed over more than 20,000 boxes of opium. You know, at that time, Britain only transported more than 40,000 boxes of opium a year.
While collecting opium, Lin Zexu ordered officers and soldiers to raid opium smoke houses everywhere. The punishment for those officials and civilians who smoke opium is very strict. And he did not choose to burn the seized opium with fire, but put the opium in the sea water for more than forty days.
First of all, Lin Zexu did not choose to use fire because opium could not be destroyed after the fire was completed. Lin Zexu served in the Huguang region in his early years, when he saw that many people were smoking opium, and they had a very bad impact on the whole society, so Lin Zexu wrote to the Daoguang Emperor to request a ban on smoking. The Daoguang Emperor himself had tasted opium, and he knew how vicious this thing was, so he approved Lin Zexu's request. Lin Zexu immediately began to act, and within a few days Lin Zexu confiscated a lot of opium. In the face of the seized opium, Lin Zexu has been thinking about what method to use to sell cigarettes. Thinking about it, Lin Zexu still used the oldest way of selling tobacco - the method of selling tobacco with tung oil. The use of tung oil to mix with opium smoke to burn, the smoke itself will still cause harm to people, and the resulting smoke paste will seep into the ground, dig out or use. In this way, the effect of Lin Zexu's resolute ban on smoking cannot be achieved.
With the lessons of the past, Lin Zexu will certainly not repeat the same mistakes, so Lin Zexu invented a new way of selling cigarettes - seawater immersion method. Lin Zexu first had people dig a large pit in the sea, then spread stones at the bottom of the pit, then introduce seawater, and then soak opium in this seawater. With the seawater soaking for more than forty days, the opium is immersed in various compounds by the seawater, and the addition of lime at this time can make the opium dissolve in the seawater as much as possible, leaving a little residue. Then Lin Zexu asked people to dig a ditch leading to the sea, and when the tide rose, Lin Zexu ordered the ditch to be opened, and the opium slag was washed away by the sea, and those addicts who wanted to find opium slag could only go to the sea to find it. Lin Zexu's anti-smoking method not only effectively completed the anti-smoking work, but also avoided people from being poisoned, which is a move to kill two birds with one stone. Since then, Lin Zexu has become a famous anti-smoking hero in China.
From today's point of view, Lin Zexu's smoking ban is not perfect, although opium slag can not be used by people, but it pollutes the coastal waters, causing a bad impact on coastal organisms, but also causing damage to the ecological environment. But in that particular era, when people were not yet able to live and work in peace and contentment, who would pay attention to these details? After the ban on smoking, the people all thought that this matter was over, and only Lin Zexu realized that their competition with the foreigners had just begun at this time. Sure enough, with the end of the Smoke of Humen, the British warships also crossed the two oceans to China and started a war with this ancient country. Since then Chinese people have entered the modern history of many disasters and difficulties.