Royal Saxon (1829 ship)
ship
Royal Saxon was a British merchant ship built at Liverpool in 1829. She carried cargo and passengers to India, Australia, and the Far East. In 1839 Royal Saxon attempted to violate a Royal Navy blockade of Canton and inadvertently became the direct cause of the Battle of Chuenpi and consequently the First Opium War. She is last listed in Lloyd's Register in 1857.
First Opium War
By 1839 the opium trade was causing great tension between the British Empire and the Qing dynasty. The Chinese were concerned with the effects of opium on the general population and as such banned the substance. This action lead to the destruction of opium at Humen, an event which caused relations between Britain and China to deteriorate further. Charles Elliot, Chief Superintendent of British Trade in China, ordered British ships trading in opium to avoid Chinese ports or face sanction. However, when the Qing government issued a bond that required foreign merchants to not deal in opium if they wanted to do business in China, Elliot ordered all British shipping out of Chinese waters. Many merchants (especially those who did not participate in the opium trade) reacted negatively to Elliot's decision, feeling that the decree infringed upon their rights to trade freely.
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This entry incorporates text from “Royal Saxon (1829 ship)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.