The Greenwich dry dock is home to the last witness of the great tea races: the Cutty Sark clipper, built in Dumbarton, Scotland by Scott & Linton. It is an impressive steel, teak and elm ship that can sail from Melbourne to London in 77 days, covering up to 363 nautical miles per day.
Tea clippers are, without exaggeration, a success. Tea races are a vivid example of the courage and skill of sailors, the genius of designers and engineers. Indeed, it is hard to believe that a wind-powered ship could travel from Shanghai to London around Africa in 91 days: this is the documented Thermopylae clipper record in the 1872 race.
However, as usual, behind the outer beauty lies the basis: how big, just as ugly.
The tea regattas were not sport for sport's sake. It was a very pragmatic trade-related exercise. China, the main exporter of tea, was separated from England by almost half of the planet in the 19th century. The Suez Canal will only open in 1869. Slow sailing ships with a cargo of tea covered the way around the Cape of Good Hope in 6-7 months. During such a long journey, fresh tea leaves had time to mold and become saturated with the disgusting stench of bilge.
The exit lay in speed. The fastest ships of their time began to be put on the route: "Baltimore schooners", later called clippers. Sharp contours, a length-to-width ratio of six to one or more, together with impressive sailing rigging, allowed for incredible speed, for which you had to pay with reduced cargo capacity. It is quite clear that they were suitable for the transportation of special cargoes, which combined high liquidity and small volumes in their own use value. Tea is one such product. Since 1859, monetary prizes have been established in Britain for winning the race from Shanghai to London. The era of the famous tea regattas began.
But it is not without reason that we made a reservation: “one of these products”. Opium became another product much more valuable than tea. And here it is necessary to forget about the tea races for a while and move first to London, then to India, and from there to China during the Qing dynasty.
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In 1600, the Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading with the East Indies was founded in England, better known simply as the East India Company. In 1612, the company's troops were entrenched in the Indian subcontinent, forcing out the Portuguese competitors by military means. Over the next five years, the company acquired 23 trading posts in India. In 1668, the British rented the island of Bombay at the mouth of the Ulhas River from the Portuguese as a dowry of Catherine of Bragan, wife of King Charles II Stuart. In 1757-1764, the company's troops defeated the Bengali troops, seizing control of Bengal, Orissa and Bihar (state formations in India, which was then in the stage of fragmentation). The expansion continued:by 1818, Britain controlled major areas south of the Sutledge River.
The first governor of Bengal was Colonel Robert Clive, 1st Baron Plessis. He took out of Bengal valuables worth 5 million 260 thousand pounds as a one-time contribution. The amount at that time was astronomical. Taxes sharply increased, Bengali artisans and farmers were attached to trading posts, and uniform (extremely low) purchase prices were established. The result was the rapid degradation of local crafts and agriculture and the terrible famine of 1769-1770. It is no longer possible to calculate the exact number of his victims. According to various estimates, it ranges from 5 to 10 million people. Subsequently, the famine was repeated regularly: in 1783, 1866, 1873, 1892, 1897, 1943-44.
Secretary of State for Indian Affairs Leopold Charles Maurice Stennett Emery wrote in his diary Winston Churchill's words on this matter: “I hate Indians. These are animals with a bestial religion. They themselves are to blame for the hunger, because they breed like rabbits."
By the way, Churchill later said that “there was no such people as the Indians, who were so reliably protected from the horrors of World War II”. Beginning in 1770, this "fence from horror" looked terrifying.
The direct robbery of India in 1757-1780, according to Indian historians and economists, amounted to 38 million pounds. In terms of the purchasing power of the 1750 pound to the present day, this is approximately 4.560 million pounds.
Overexploitation was added to the robbery: taxes were regularly and much (sometimes doubled) increased. For non-payment of taxes, Indian peasants were deprived of their land property. Dwellings, livestock, even clothing and kitchen utensils were taken away.
And this is where we come to opium.
The peasants and artisans had to somehow survive. One of the relatively reliable ways to make money was to get involved in the production or trade of opium. Why opium?
The tradition of opium consumption in Asia has a long tradition. With the spread of Islam in Central Asia, the tradition of drinking alcoholic beverages as a relaxing remedy was undermined. The vacant place was taken by drugs. In particular, opium was dissolved in water and consumed dry. With the spread of tobacco, they began to mix it with tobacco leaves: this mixture was called "madak". The effect was comparable to that of marijuana. It was also used in China.
The Chinese authorities regularly banned opium, but not because they cared about the health of the population, but because it was an imported product. The Qing empire, on the other hand, was quite vigilant in its trade relations with its neighbors.
The East India Company brought the first trial batches of the drug to China in 1711. Why was it necessary?
China is a huge and quite remote country from Britain. At that time, there were not enough forces for direct conquest, and trade with China was very attractive. Capital as a self-increasing value objectively demanded the expansion of markets. The Chinese market is tea, silk, porcelain and many other extremely valuable and useful items. The authorities of the Qing Empire severely restricted foreign trade, pursuing a policy of protectionism. Traders could not communicate directly with the Chinese authorities. There was a trade imbalance unacceptable for the West.
There was nothing to offer the Chinese other than a very limited range of goods (lead, tin, raw cotton and some luxury goods). With the onset of the tea boom, the imbalance has taken on egregious proportions. Real money flowed from the metropolis to China.
Opium saved the day. If in the second half of the 18th century the largest market for opium produced by the East India Company was the Malay island of Penang, and at the turn of the 19th century - Java, then by 1820 over 90% of its opium exports (that is, more than 5,000 boxes per year) were in China. … By 1829, this volume had almost tripled, and four years later reached 20,000 boxes, that is, more than 1,000 tons! Finally, a commodity appeared that could plug the unfortunate gap in the trade balance of the West and East. How did you manage to import such a mass of prohibited goods into the country? After all, a company as respectable as the East India would not be involved in smuggling.
The case was outsourced to private contractors. For example, a veteran of the opium trade is Jardine, Matheson & Co., a major smuggling agent. By the way, the firm lives to this day under the name Jardine Matheson Holdings Limited, based in Hong Kong and on the 170th place in the world according to the Forbes Global list.
It should be clearly understood that these successful guys with assets of $ 63.5 billion did not appear from scratch and not from great talent to business. It is based on a banal drug trade started by people with kind faces: James Mattison and William Jardine. If you are staying in luxury hotels that belong to this company, remember: all this splendor is built on drug money, paid by millions of hilarious Indians and Chinese.
The resulting trading system was ingenious in its own way. The East India Company left the local trade between India and China at the mercy of private merchants, retaining a monopoly on the supply of tea directly to England and on the production of opium in India. The company delivered the finished product to Calcutta, here it was sold at open auctions - and that was all: then the company did not bear any responsibility for the product.
Its direct delivery to China was carried out by agency companies based in Macau and Canton. Since opium came to Calcutta more or less all year round, these companies had to ensure the same rhythmic delivery to the consumer: they could not depend on the associated seasonal monsoons that blew in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. As a result, a fundamentally new type of ships was created: opium clippers, which had the ability to move almost towards the strongest monsoons.
A great zero waste business strategy was born.
A clipper loaded with industrial goods sailed from England to Calcutta. In Calcutta, he received a shipment of opium, following that to Canton. There the clipper received a full hold of tea, after which the race began home so that the British could drink a fresh and tasty drink. While these gears were spinning, the mechanism produced pure gold.
The cost of one box of opium in India was about £ 150, while in Canton it was up to £ 520. And one medium-sized clipper could hold up to 300 boxes. It's not hard to count. The flight margin was £ 111,000. At current prices, that's around £ 12,000,000 or $ 17,000,000. The ship made three voyages per year, and large agency companies could have ten or more clippers at sea at the same time. That is, the profit from only opium voyages of 10 ships per year is about $ 510 million. If we take into account the supply of consumer goods to India, then the benefits are somewhat greater.
For opium, the Chinese usually paid in cash in silver. But in the pirate-infested waters of the South China Sea, it was dangerous to ship large quantities of silver. Therefore, the agent, having completed the transaction, usually went to the Cantonese office of the East India Company and bought its bills with the proceeds of silver, which were to be redeemed in London. The company immediately used this silver to purchase tea. Thus, the circle was closed: the precious metal flowing through the "tea" channel began to return through the "opium".
However, as the supply of opium grew, the volume of silver proceeds began to significantly exceed the needs of the tea trade. And the ships of the company began to export from the Celestial Empire not only tea, but also silver. Now it was not China that was sucking the precious metal out of the British economy, but, on the contrary, Britain - from the Chinese one. Moreover, for China, such an outflow was much more sensitive, since the country had practically no other sources of silver (its own production was insignificant).
But the problems posed by the opium trade were by no means limited to economics alone. In Canton alone, the number of smokers who became completely addicted to the drug was estimated by European missionaries in the tens of thousands.
From the coast, the drug spread throughout the country, reaching the most remote villages. The opium epidemic has affected all sectors of society. When Emperor Daoguang, having occupied the throne in 1820, ordered to prepare a report on the extent of drug addiction, as they would now say, then one of the most affected layers of this disease were officials and the army. Moreover, opium smokers were identified in the immediate environment of the Son of Heaven himself.
It all ended with the Opium Wars. There were two of them in total: in 1840-1842 and 1856-1860. The reason for the first of these (1840-1842) was the confiscation of more than 20,000 boxes of opium from British merchants by the Chinese authorities. Britain sent a squadron to the Chinese coast. The war ended with a swift British victory. On August 29, 1842, the Nanking Peace Treaty was signed, according to which China paid an indemnity and gave Hong Kong to the British. However, the Europeans never got the right to freely trade opium. In the Second Opium War (1856-1860), the pretext for which was the seizure of an English smuggled ship by the Chinese, a coalition of the Western powers participated: England, France and the United States. Unsurprisingly, China lost again. The victorious countries received significant privileges in trade with the Celestial Empire. In particular,the opium trade was legalized.
As a result, China was forced to "open the country" by lifting all restrictions on trade. In 1899, the Ikhetuan uprising, directly related to the Opium Wars, was suppressed by the alliance of 8 countries (including Tsarist Russia) in 1901. Only half a century later, in 1913, the democrats who came to power after the victory of the Xinghai Revolution banned the import of drugs into the country.
Mao and his followers had to struggle with the medical consequences of centuries of drug addiction. For Europe (and already England), the London-Calcutta-Canton-London route has become a real golden triangle. Its gold is a significant part in the foundation of the industrial revolution and the subsequent economic well-being of the West. Paid for it with millions of deaths from India to China. Beautiful streets, cozy cafes, a high standard of living and cultural treatment in European capitals did not come from scratch. On the “other shoulder” of the century, it smelled of gunpowder, blood and corpses.
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West Bengal, UK territory. In 1943, 80,000 tons of grain were exported from starving Bengal.