Opium in Hong Kong
The British colony at Hong Kong was a by-product of the Opium War of 1839-1842. Hong Kong’s viability as a colony was also closely linked to the opium trade. Early Hong Kong served as “the central warehouse” for “British Indian produce” and had little other trade to sustain it. By the late 1840s, it was estimated, three-quarters of the entire Indian opium crop passed through Hong Kong. Hong Kong broadened its economic base in the 1850s, when it became a center for the coolie trade between China and the New World and began to develop the banking, shipping and entrepot functions that have sustained it to this day. For much of the remainder of the century, however, the transshipment of opium to China continued to be a vital part of the colony’s trade. Indeed, the opium trade and Hong Kong are so obviously intertwined that it is hardly possible to consider the early history of the colony without some reference to the drug: the colony was founded because of opium; its principal merchants grew rich on opium; and its government subsisted on the high land rent and the revenue made possibly by the opium trade.
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British policy had not initially intended that the new colony should be so closely connected with the opium trade, which was technically illegal in China until 1858. Ministers in London directed that the export of opium from the island should be prohibited or discouraged through the imposition of duties, at least until a legal trade in the drug had been agreed upon with the Qing
government. This policy reflected a claim, prevalent among promoters both of the Opium War and of the new colony, that, with the opening of more general commerce with China, British merchants would quickly see their dependence on opium replaced by a more healthy trade in British manufactures.
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As the many critics of the new colony pointed out, except as an opium depot or as a military base for the widely predicted second China war, Hong Kong had little to offer. Had it not been for its role as a safe warehouse to the illicit opium stations scattered along the coast, and for parliamentary subsidies, the colony would have been bankrupt and probably abandoned before the end of the 1840s.
-Opium Regimes