Opium

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Opium is the dried latex of Papaver somniferum, an addictive narcotic that the East India Company organised as a monopoly crop in Bengal, principally around Patna and Benares, with a competing Malwa production shipped from Bombay. Its import into China was illegal under Qing law, so the Company did not carry it itself: it auctioned the drug in Calcutta to private 'country' traders who smuggled it to the China coast, keeping the Company's Canton tea business formally clean. Imports rose from a few thousand chests a year in the 1820s to over 30,000 by 1830 and roughly 40,000 by 1839. The trade reversed the flow of silver, funded the tea purchase, and produced mass addiction in China — which is what the Qing prohibition campaign of 1839 was responding to.

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