OK, so I saw this statue in Chinatown to a Chinese man who was instrumental in taking measures to stop the opium trade in the 1840s.
I remembered reading a book about the opium trade a few years ago and the statue confused me. The story is that the tribute to Lin Ze Xu is because he was anti drugs.
However, I was wondering if this statue was a poke in the eye for someone. I was suspecting for the British /imperialist colonisationists/ all round bad eggs. I thought I'd check it out.
You will need to bear with me here. I will try to be as succinct as I can be:
Sugar cane was being widely cultivated in British colonies for years before tea became popular. The British used tea as a vehicle for consuming sugar (tea + sugar = enhanced sugar sales). Milk was added and it became the fashionable drink of choice.
However, tea was grown in China as a commodity. The Chinese were not keen to share the plants / methods and China was not a British colony. Britain had nothing to trade which the Chinese wanted and couldn't invade this ancient civilisation, what's a small imperialist country to do?
They decided to trade opium. Opium was made in India by indentured servants. Britain was openly against slavery from 1833 (ish), so what the British did to find a way around it was worse. They used indentured workers. An Indian in India signed up to work a piece of land. They were legally tied to British (or Indian) land owners and had to work the land for a given period. They paid a (very high) rent to the landowner and had to buy all their groceries and equipment from the land owner.
Now, those of you who have earnt a living making opium will know that it makes you addicted. Smelling the fumes all day, you become sick, you die. Your family is indentured or homeless.
Indian workers were stuck in a rut. Opium production rocketed.
The British imported opium to China. At first they gave it away. They promoted it. They set up dens and plied the Chinese with it. Then they started to exchange it. Silk, porcelain, tea. British merchants became rich moving opium and Chinese products around the world.
China developed a huge drug problem, the British became the biggest drug pushers ever and monopolised the tea trade. (see also Boston Tea Party for how Americans and British fell out over tea).
Chinese authorities started to take measures to prevent the British bringing opium in. These included: storming ships and confiscating product, refusing to let British ships land, on pain of being blown up with gun powder, closing dens and arresting opium sellers. Lin Ze Xu was instrumental in the first opium war and the ideas (listed) behind its prevention.
Interesting fact: in 1906 it was estimated that 23.3% of Chinese adult males were addicted to opium.
Interesting fact: Lin Ze Xu had hundreds of workers who mixed the confiscated opium with lime and sea salt before throwing it in the sea to get rid of it. The gave apologies to the god of the sea for pollution.
SO, the British lost their trade, the Americans broke away from the UK (starting with tea) and the Indian population were eventually united by Ghandi against the imperialists and sought independence.
But why Lin Ze Xu in China Town? Well...turns out he's from Fujian Province. During the 20th century the number of Mandarin Chinese people in NY outstripped the number of Cantonese Chinese people and while 'Confucius is for all Chinese' (Zheng Dezhang, Quora), Lin Ze Xu represents people from Fujian. In NY people from Fujian had (apparently) a reputation for selling drugs.
So, possible reasons for Lin Ze Xu:
1. One upmanship between Chinese immigrants.
2. To remind each other (and the world) that a Fujian bureaucrat was instrumental in stopping the world's largest drug trade, as opposed to the Fujianese being drug sellers.
3. To demonstrate how the Chinese worked with Americans (tea related) and were allies during independence and when the British were naffing everyone off tea-wise (Boston tea party again)
4. To send a poke in the eye to the British by reminding them that you can't have everything and you need to stay in your own dance space.
5. All of the above? Something completely different?
Phew. Many layered.
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