Queen Victoria is often remembered as the figurehead of a moral, industrious era in British history. Yet the global economic machinery that operated during her reign included one of the most controversial trades of the 19th century: the export of opium from British-controlled India to China. Historians have long examined how the British Empire’s opium commerce reshaped global trade, triggered conflict with China and became deeply intertwined with imperial finances. In his 2025 book Human History On Drugs: An Utterly Scandalous but Entirely Truthful Look at History Under the Influence, author Sam Kelly revisits the scale of that system and the role the Victorian Empire played in sustaining it. At the same time, Kelly notes that the monarch who presided over the empire during its expansion, Queen Victoria, also lived in a period when many narcotics now considered illegal were widely used as medical treatments.
The young monarch and the drugs she used
Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837 at just 18 years old, inheriting an empire that was already stretching across Asia, Africa and the Americas. She also lived in an era when many substances now tightly controlled were treated as ordinary medicine. As Sam Kelly notes in Human History On Drugs, the young monarch regularly used several pharmaceuticals that Victorian doctors considered perfectly respectable.One of the most common remedies of the period was laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol prescribed for everything from pain and anxiety to general fatigue. Kelly writes that the queen began many mornings with it, noting that “Queen Victoria drank a big swig of laudanum every morning.” At the time, laudanum was so widely accepted that it appeared in medicine cabinets across Britain and was even recommended for children suffering from teething pains.
Queen Victoria Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Victoria also experimented with cocaine, which had only recently entered European medicine and had not yet been criminalised. In the late 19th century it was marketed as an invigorating stimulant, and Kelly describes it as providing “a powerful blast of self-confidence.” The queen reportedly consumed it in forms such as chewing gum or wine, which were fashionable preparations of the drug at the time.Other substances entered her life through medical advice. Her physician prescribed liquid cannabis to help relieve menstrual discomfort, while chloroform was used during childbirth after it was introduced as an anaesthetic in the mid-19th century. Victoria embraced the treatment enthusiastically; after inhaling chloroform during labour she described the sensation as “delightful beyond measure.”Looking back on these habits, historian Tony McMahon, writing in Smithsonian Magazine, summed up the monarch’s relationship with pharmaceuticals rather bluntly: “Queen Victoria, I think by any standard, she loved her drugs.”
Britain’s tea addiction and the search for a trade solution
While Victoria’s personal drug use reflected the medical norms of the period, the much larger story involved Britain’s economic relationship with China. During the early 19th century, Britain imported vast quantities of Chinese tea, which had become a staple in households across the country. According to Kelly, this demand created a severe trade imbalance. He writes that the average London household was spending around 5% of its income on Chinese tea, sending large amounts of silver to China because Britain had little that Chinese markets wanted in return.
French satire showing an Englishman ordering the Emperor of China to buy opium. A Chinese man lies dead on floor with troops in background. The text says: “You must buy this poison immediately. We want you to poison yourself completely, because we need a lot of tea in order to digest our beefsteaks.”
The solution British merchants pursued was opium. The drug was cultivated in British-controlled India, particularly under the economic influence of the East India Company, which dominated much of the region’s agricultural production.
A class of opium cultivators weighing opium in an Indian factoryWikimedia Commons
Opium was highly addictive and widely used as a painkiller, making it extremely valuable in Chinese markets. Kelly explains that Britain had been exporting opium to China for years, but the trade expanded dramatically during the Victorian period. “China was forced to return all the silver the British had spent on tea, plus a great deal more,” Kelly writes. “Now it was China, not Britain, that was racking up ruinous trade deficits.” At its height, the opium trade generated between 15% and 20% of the British Empire’s annual revenue, making it one of the most lucrative commercial systems connected to the imperial economy.
China’s attempt to stop the opium trade
Chinese officials increasingly viewed the growing opium addiction crisis as a national emergency. The Qing emperor appointed senior official Lin Zexu (Tse-Hsu), a scholar and imperial commissioner, to suppress the narcotics trade. Lin attempted to resolve the crisis diplomatically. He wrote a letter addressed to Queen Victoria arguing that China was exporting useful goods, including tea, silk and porcelain, while Britain was sending addictive narcotics that were harming Chinese citizens.
Seizure and destruction of opium on the orders of Lin Tse-Hsu/ Image: historic-uk
Lin asked why Britain would export “poisonous drugs” to China. The appeal failed to halt the trade.
The seizure that triggered the First Opium War
In 1839, Lin Zexu escalated enforcement efforts against foreign traders. He ordered the confiscation of large quantities of opium from British merchants operating in Chinese ports.According to historical accounts cited by Kelly, the confrontation escalated dramatically in 1839 when Chinese authorities seized a vast shipment of British opium. Under the orders of imperial commissioner Lin Zexu, around 2.5 million pounds of the drug were confiscated and publicly destroyed, dumped into the South China Sea in an attempt to halt the illegal trade that had flooded the country with addiction.The move provoked a swift response from Britain and soon led to the outbreak of the First Opium War (1839–1842). British naval and military forces ultimately defeated Qing China, forcing the imperial government to accept the Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing) . Under its terms, China was compelled to hand over Hong Kong to British control, open several additional ports to foreign commerce and grant British citizens operating in the country special legal protections under extraterritorial arrangements.
The Treaty of Nanking was signed on August 29, 1842, aboard HMS Cornwallis in Nanjing, formally ending the First Opium War between Britain and the Qing dynasty.
For China, the consequences extended far beyond the treaty itself. The conflict exposed the military vulnerability of the Qing Empire and marked the beginning of a long period of foreign intervention and political pressure by Western powers, a period that historians later came to describe as the beginning of China’s “century of humiliation.”
Empire, medicine and the contradictions of the Victorian era
Historians generally note that the opium trade was not directed personally by Queen Victoria but operated through the broader machinery of empire, merchants, colonial administrations and the powerful East India Company that controlled large parts of India’s economy.Still, the period reveals a striking historical contrast. While Victorian Britain cultivated a reputation for strict social values at home, the empire was simultaneously profiting from a global narcotics trade that reshaped commerce and diplomacy across continents.
Kelly also notes an unusual contradiction in Victoria’s attitudes toward drugs. While the British Empire continued exporting vast quantities of opium to China, the queen believed cocaine to be a harmless stimulant and reportedly refused to allow it to be included in the trade. As Kelly puts it, she was willing to sell China “all the opium in the world,” but they were “not to touch her cocaine.”
