Governing Imperial Ambitions and Local Interests: The Transformation of Opium Policy in Colonial Hong Kong, c. 1906–1914

This article examines the transformation of Hong Kong’s opium policy from 1906 to 1914. From 1906 onward, accelerating international and regional anti-opium movements, together with the 1907 Anglo-Chinese Ten-Year Opium Agreement, intensified British imperial pressure on Hong Kong to restrict the opium trade and transshipment, close opium houses, and curb consumption. In response to moral pressure, Governor Frederick Lugard and Assistant Colonial Secretary Cecil Clementi investigated the opium farm, its revenues, and the commercial networks behind it. Clementi’s private papers, in particular, document his detailed inquiry into the losses involved in disrupting the existing opium farm contract and closing all opium houses. As the Colony shifted the practical burdens of reform back to the metropole, its compensation claims exposed disagreements within the British government, especially between the Colonial Office and the Treasury, over the grant amount and responsibility for administrative stability. Yet the imperial grant failed to allay Hong Kong opium merchants’ concerns about the contraction of the Sino-Indian opium trade. The Hong Kong government then established a government opium monopoly in the name of reform. This article argues that negotiations among imperial ambitions, colonial interests, and the cooperation and competition between colonial officials and Hong Kong opium merchants shaped colonial opium policy and limited moral reform in a revenue-dependent system.