The Emperor himself seethed with rage, vainly condemning the sale of opium as morally indefensible and ruinous to the health and property of his people. Meanwhile, the trade rose from $6,122,100 in 1821 to $15,338,160 in 1832. The British government took a strong official line against the traffic and denied its protection to British traders caught smuggling, but left the enforcement of anti-opium laws in Chinese hands. A joint Sino-British enforcement campaign was out of the question, since the Chinese had not granted diplomatic recognition to the British Empire. This insuperable obstacle to combined action was the natural child of Chinese xenophobia. When Lord Napier broached the subject of establishing diplomatic relations between Britain and China in 1834, the Emperor’s representatives stilled his overtures with the contemptuous question, “How can the officers of the Celestial Empire hold official correspondence with barbarians?” The glories of a mercantile civilization made no impression on a people who regarded themselves as the sole heirs of the oldest surviving culture on earth. To the lords of the Manchu empire, English traders were crude, money-grubbing upstarts who had neither the knowledge nor the capacity to appreciate the traditions and philosophy of China. What could these cubs of the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution contribute to a civilization of such time-tested wisdom? They could contribute to its collapse, as the Chinese were to learn when their medieval war-machine collided with the striking power and nineteenth-century technology of the British Navy. After the East India Co. lost its monopoly on the China trade in 1833, the British government sent its own representatives to settle a fast-growing dispute between English and Chinese merchants. Once again the Chinese snubbed these envoys and emphasized their unwillingness to compromise by appointing a new Imperial Commissioner to suppress the opium trade. For a time, the British merchants comforted themselves with the delusion that Lin Tse-hsu, the Imperial Commissioner, could be bought off or mollified. He dashed these hopes by blockading the Boca Tigris, surrounding the foreign warehouses at Canton with guards and demanding that all foreign merchants surrender their stock of opium. He further insisted that they sign a pledge to import no more opium or face the death penalty. Threats and vehement protests by the traders only drove Lin to stiffer counter-measures, and the British were at last forced to surrender more than 20,000 chests of opium worth $6,000,000. Commissioner Lin destroyed the opium immediately. British merchants and their government envoys withdrew from Canton by ship, ultimately anchoring off Hong Kong Island. None of them lived ashore; the island looked too bleak for English habitation, though it had already been considered as a possible offshore port of foreign trade.