Lin Zexu
The upright Qing commissioner whose 1839 destruction of British opium triggered the First Opium War, later rehabilitated as a hero of Chinese resistance.
Lin Zexu did precisely what his emperor asked, destroyed a fortune in smuggled opium, and was rewarded with disgrace and exile to the far northwest. A century later the same act made him a national hero. The Qing official whose crackdown lit the fuse of the First Opium War is now cast, in China, as the incorruptible patriot who first stood up to foreign narcotics.
The commissioner
Born in Fujian in 1785, Lin rose through the imperial examination system on merit and earned a reputation for competence and honesty rare in the late Qing bureaucracy. As governor-general in central China he had curbed opium effectively, and in late 1838 the Daoguang Emperor named him imperial commissioner and sent him to Canton, the single port where foreign trade was permitted, to end the traffic that was draining the empire's silver and hollowing out its population. Lin arrived in March 1839 and moved fast. He surrounded the foreign warehouses, cut off their supplies, and forced the merchants to surrender their stock: roughly 1,000 tons of opium, some 20,000 chests. Over 23 days that summer he had it dissolved in trenches at Humen and flushed into the sea.
Appeal and war
Lin was not merely a hardliner; he tried argument too. He drafted an open letter to Queen Victoria appealing to her conscience, asking how Britain could permit a trade it banned at home and detailing the harm it did. The letter probably never reached her, though it was later printed in the Times. Argument was beside the point. The British superintendent of trade, Charles Elliot, had persuaded the merchants to surrender their opium as Crown property, which turned a commercial loss into a national grievance London could act on. Britain regarded the seizure as an assault on property and free trade and used it as the pretext for war. When the modern British fleet arrived in 1840 and Qing forces proved helpless, the emperor needed a scapegoat. He turned on Lin, stripped his offices, and banished him to Ili in remote Xinjiang.
Rehabilitation
Exile was not the end. Lin was eventually restored to imperial service and died in 1850 on his way to help suppress the Taiping Rebellion. His real second life came posthumously. As Chinese nationalism searched the past for figures who had resisted foreign domination, Lin Zexu was an ideal candidate: honest, principled, and defeated not by his own failings but by an enemy with better guns. His name became shorthand for clean, principled service, and the anniversary of the Humen destruction is still marked in China. Today he stands in bronze from Fuzhou to a street corner in New York's Chinatown, remembered less for losing a war than for refusing to let a great power poison his country without a fight.