In the junior high school history books, we know that Lin Zexu was the first person in China to open his eyes to the world, he knew very early on the wolf ambitions of foreign invaders, and in the face of the opium that flooded everywhere in the Qing Dynasty during the Daoguang years, Lin Zexu was well aware of the harm. Britain used opium to seize a large amount of our silver and poison the bodies of our people. Lin Zexu felt very sad after seeing a large number of people, especially the heroic Eight Banner Soldiers and Green Battalion soldiers who became the "sick man of East Asia" because of opium. He wrote to the Daoguang Emperor: "After several decades, there will be almost no enemy soldiers in the Central Plains, and there will be no silver to pay." The Daoguang Emperor recognized the dangers of opium and appointed Lin Zexu as a minister of Chincha to Guangzhou, where opium was most prevalent, to ban smoking.
Lin Zexu, who had just arrived in Guangzhou, began to ban smoking with a thunderous momentum, not only sealing the tobacco shop, arresting and executing the most heinous tobacco dealers, but also completely blocking the thirteen lines of Guangzhou that were engaged in foreign trade with Western countries, and blocking the food and fresh water supply of those foreign merchants. Eventually, British merchants were forced to hand over more than 20,000 boxes of opium, and merchants from Britain, the United States, the Netherlands and other countries promised not to send opium to China again.
The subsequent problem facing Lin Zexu was how to deal with the 20,000 boxes of opium weighing more than 2 million kilograms. China's feudal dynasties have always had a historical tradition of showing off their exploits, so in the beginning, Lin Zexu considered shipping opium to Beijing. But because the road is long, it will take a lot of manpower and material resources to transport it to Beijing, and it will also worry about robbery. Therefore, the Daoguang Emperor instructed Lin Zexu to destroy it directly on the spot.
So how should so much opium be destroyed? Many people think of a way to destroy it directly with fire, which is the most direct and convenient and thorough. However, Lin Zexu believes that smoking opium is actually the smoke produced by smoking opium combustion, which is the same as the big smoke smoked by ordinary people. If so much opium is burned directly by fire, it is equivalent to collective drug use, so it is not possible to directly destroy opium with fire. Finally, Lin Zexu wanted to use tung oil to destroy it with opium. Although this method is a little better than directly burning with fire, it also has disadvantages. That is, after destroying the opium in this way, some opium will seep into the ground, so that there will be addicts who will secretly go to dig up cigarettes after selling cigarettes, and Lin Zexu came to ban smoking because he wanted to completely ban smoking, so he would not allow such a situation to happen.
Therefore, at this time, the "seawater immersion method" came out. Lin Zexu first had two large ponds dug out in front of the beach in Humen, and the pond was paved with stone slabs, and there were also wooden planks around the pool, thus isolating the infiltration of opium into the surrounding soil. When the tide was high, the sea water was poured into the pool, and the soldiers poured all the chopped opium into the pool, and then imported the quicklime, and then stirred it with bamboo poles, so that the opium was all destroyed. Finally, when the tide rises again, the floodgates are opened and the seawater is allowed to bring all the remaining opium into the seawater.