The destruction of opium at Humen
From June 3, 1839, Lin Zexu dug two pools on the Humen beach and steeped and dissolved twenty thousand two hundred and eighty-three chests of opium in brine and lime, destroying it all in twenty-three days before tens of thousands of onlookers, foreign merchants permitted to watch on the spot. He first sacrificed to the sea god, asking the sea creatures to keep clear of the tainted water. It was the largest anti-drug operation in human history — and it pushed the empire to the very cliff of war with the strongest navy in the world.
Opening his eyes to the world
Unlike his arrogant colleagues, Lin Zexu organized a team in Guangzhou to translate English newspapers and a world geography into the Gazetteer of the Four Continents, bought Western cannon and copied warships, and admitted, "Their great guns reach ten li and more; if our cannon cannot reach them, theirs reach us first." Before his exile he handed all his materials to Wei Yuan and charged him to expand them — the Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms was later reprinted in over twenty editions in Japan and became a founding text for the reform-minded activists of the Meiji Restoration; in its own homeland, the book went all but unread.