Lin Zexu

Lin Zexu was born on August 30, 1785, in Houguan (now Fuzhou), Fujian province, the second son of his family.⁠[1]

His birthplace is on Zhongshan Road in today’s Gulou district of Fuzhou; there he was born, studied, passed the provincial and metropolitan examinations, married and began his official career. Early in 2024 the site was listed among Fuzhou’s first demonstration sites for Taiwan compatriots seeking their roots.⁠[2][3]

The family’s ancestors came from Putian, Fujian, and belonged to the Jiumu Lin branch; they moved to Fuqing and later to Houguan (now Fuzhou). The Lin ancestral home at Cendou village, Haikou town, Fuqing, was first built at the end of the Ming dynasty and was more than 390 years old in 2025.⁠[3][4]

His courtesy names were Yuanfu, Shaomu and Shilin; in later life he called himself the Old Man Awaiting the Village (Sicun laoren) and the Lay Buddhist of the Vase Spring (Pingquan jushi).⁠[5][6]

When he was born the family had come down in the world: his father, Lin Binri, owned no land, and more than ten family members crowded into a rented house; Lin Binri described the household as having not a foot of land or half a mu of field.⁠[3]

His father, Lin Binri, originally named Tianhan, was a tribute student (suigongsheng) who made his living by teaching; he was 37 when Lin Zexu was born, and he insisted that his sons study the Confucian classics as the way into government service.⁠[7][1]

His mother, Chen Zhi, was skilled at needlework and at cutting coloured paper into flowers and plants large and small, which helped support the household.⁠[7]

On long winter nights the family gathered around a single oil lamp, some reading and some sewing. Lin later recalled such nights of his childhood: on cold, long nights, in a shabby three-room house with the north wind howling and a single lamp on the wall, young and old sat in order, some reading and some sewing, their skin goose-fleshed and their hands chapped, often until the water clock ran out. Hall A of the Lin Zexu Memorial Hall in Fuzhou displays a Lin family heirloom, a blue-and-white porcelain oil lamp, an ordinary folk-kiln piece of the Daoguang period.⁠[3]

He began his schooling at the age of seven and passed the county-level examination (xiucai) at fourteen.⁠[3]

In 1804, the ninth year of the Jiaqing reign, he passed the provincial examination (juren) in twenty-ninth place. The People’s Weekly article says he married Zheng Shuqing on the very day of his success; Zou Zizhen’s article says he married her soon afterwards. She was the daughter of Zheng Damo, a former magistrate of Yongcheng county in Henan.⁠[5][7]

In the same year he became an aide to the governor of Fujian.⁠[1]

In 1811, the sixteenth year of the Jiaqing reign, he passed the metropolitan examination (jinshi), the highest degree, was selected as a bachelor (shujishi) and entered the Hanlin Academy, which advised the emperor and drafted documents.⁠[8][1][9]

In the capital he served as compiler and assistant compiler, among other posts, and was twice sent out as an examiner for the provincial examinations, in Jiangxi and in Yunnan.⁠[8]

From 1820 he held provincial posts, serving in turn as salt official of the Hangzhou–Jiaxing–Huzhou circuit in Zhejiang, judicial commissioner of Jiangsu and administration commissioner of Jiangning; his first regular administrative post was in the salt monopoly.⁠[8][1]

He went on to supervise water-control works in several localities, administer tax collection and serve as a judicial official, and for his integrity and fairness people called him Lin the Clear Sky (Lin Qingtian).⁠[1][10]

A 2005 report in the Jinling Evening News says that he served in Nanjing as Jiangsu’s judicial official for seven years in all and wrote a couplet in his hall asking to understand the people’s condition and to hear of his own faults; the people of Nanjing of their own accord built a shrine to him and to Tao Shu, then governor-general of Liangjiang, in their lifetimes, the Shrine of the Two Lords Tao and Lin, which was demolished in 2001.⁠[10]

Between 1820 and 1850, whenever crises arose in flood control, sea transport, the salt administration or military affairs, he was almost certain to be considered for the post. He served as an official for forty years in fourteen provinces, and also served as acting governor-general of Liangjiang.⁠[9][4][3]

In the first month of the fourth year of Daoguang (1824) he was judicial commissioner of Jiangsu and acting administration commissioner. On the 17th day of the intercalary seventh month of that year (traditional calendar), his mother, Chen Zhi, died in Fuzhou at the age of 65; Lin, then dealing with the aftermath of severe floods in Jiangsu, returned to Fuzhou on the 19th day of the eighth month to observe mourning and wrote a brief account of her life (Xianbi shilüe).⁠[7]

In the winter of 1824 the Gaojiayan dike of Hongze Lake in Jiangsu burst at its Zhouqiao section, flooding more than ten counties south of the Yangtze and cutting off the grain transport to the capital; Lin, still in mourning, answered the summons and went to the site in plain mourning clothes, and over nearly six months closed the breach and restored the grain shipments.⁠[3]

In the eighth month of the seventh year of Daoguang (1827), Lin Binri set out from Fuzhou accompanied by Lin Zexu’s younger brother Peilin and died of illness on the 27th day of the ninth month in the prefectural city of Quzhou, Zhejiang, aged 79 (dates as the article gives them in the traditional calendar); Lin Zexu received the news on the 19th day of the tenth month, hurried south, reached Quzhou on the 8th day of the twelfth month, escorted the coffin back to Fuzhou and wrote an account of his father’s conduct (Xiankao xingzhuang). Within three years he had lost both parents.⁠[7]

In 1828, while in mourning in Fuzhou, he directed and personally supervised the dredging of West Lake in Fuzhou and fixed its boundaries with stone embankments.⁠[3]

In 1830, the tenth year of Daoguang, he was appointed administration commissioner of Hubei and Henan. That summer, aged 45, on his way to Hubei he issued his first circular at Xiangyang, telling officials along the route not to come out to meet him and that he would pay his own travel and board.⁠[8][3]

In the fourth month of 1830, the tenth year of Daoguang, while in office at Suzhou, he wrote the poem To My Wife (Ji nei); Zou Zizhen judges it heartfelt and written as plainly as speech, and almost of a piece with Du Fu’s Moonlit Night and Li Shangyin’s Lines Sent North on a Rainy Night.⁠[7]

In 1831, the eleventh year of Daoguang, he was promoted to governor-general of the Eastern River Works (called the Hedong River Works on the Fuzhou municipal government’s page and in the Xinhua report), devoted himself to the study of river engineering and inspected the works in person in the ice and snow of winter.⁠[11][8][3]

In 1832, the twelfth year of Daoguang, he became governor of Jiangsu, where he concentrated on famine relief, tax reduction and water conservancy.⁠[11][6]

When Zhang Bing, Zhan Tong, Chen Lian and Huang Fanpo led risings in Taiwan in 1832, he, as governor of Jiangsu, supplied the Henan troops passing through on their way to suppress them.⁠[2]

In September 1833, after severe floods in Jiangsu, he drafted overnight a memorial of more than 3,000 characters, submitted it under his own name alone, and asked for a deferral of taxes; the Daoguang Emperor approved it.⁠[3]

As governor of Jiangsu he personally tried out double-cropped rice in the garden behind his official residence.⁠[3]

In 1837, the seventeenth year of Daoguang, he was promoted to governor-general of Huguang (Hubei and Hunan); with the damage done by opium growing, he proposed a six-point programme against it and was the first to put such measures into practice, in Huguang.⁠[8][9]

On July 10, 1838, he submitted a memorial urging strong measures against opium. Opposing a suggestion that the trade be legalized, he cited the measures by which he had suppressed it in the provinces he governed, and warned that without action China would soon have no soldiers to fight for it and no money to pay for its defence; in the memorial he wrote that once the poison had spread throughout the realm the harm would be immense, and the law had to be applied strictly.⁠[9][1][12][3]

In the eleventh month of the eighteenth year of Daoguang (1838), the Daoguang Emperor appointed him imperial commissioner with full powers to suppress opium in Guangdong, with command of the Guangdong navy and charge of the seaports; in December 1838 the emperor promulgated regulations banning opium.⁠[8][12][9]

Before leaving he had nineteen personal audiences with the Daoguang Emperor; he then travelled south to Guangzhou (Canton).⁠[1]

Before the destruction of opium at Humen he wrote a couplet and hung it in the hall of his office as a warning to himself: the sea takes in a hundred rivers and is great because it is capacious; a cliff stands a thousand fathoms high and is firm because it is free of desire.⁠[3]

Early in 1839, travelling to Guangdong as imperial commissioner, he issued a second circular from Liangxiang: he would arrange and pay for his own transport at the post stations of the districts on his route, and nothing at all was to be demanded; officials were not to come out to meet or see him off, his lodging was to offer only plain home-style meals, and his retinue was strictly forbidden to accept gift money.⁠[3]

As soon as he reached the wharf at Jinjiang on his way south he wrote to his wife, Zheng Shuqing, that the journey along the coast had been safe apart from some seasickness, and that on arriving at Jinjiang he felt entirely well; he urged his second son to be extremely careful and not to presume on his father’s position by consorting with officials, and wrote that being an official was not easy, and being a high official even less so.⁠[5]

His surviving diary of this period records his journey from Beijing, his sweating and kowtowing in the heat of Canton, his summoning of British merchants and officials, and his failed attempts to make corrupt Chinese officials do their jobs.⁠[1]

He arrived in Canton on March 10, 1839, and worked with Deng Tingzhen, governor-general of Liangguang, and Guan Tianpei, naval commander-in-chief of Guangdong, to strengthen coastal defences.⁠[9][12]

That month he issued a proclamation: Chinese who sold opium or ran smoking dens would be punished, users faced the death penalty, and all remaining opium had to be surrendered; foreign merchants had to hand over all their stocks and sign a pledge never again to ship opium to China, on pain of confiscation and punishment.⁠[12]

The foreign merchants at first refused, and Lancelot Dent urged the others to withhold their opium. He halted trade at Canton, blockaded the factories, withdrew the Chinese employees of the Thirteen Factories and cut off their communications and supplies, in effect placing some 350 foreign merchants in the trading zone under house arrest; with Deng Tingzhen and others he also summoned the foreign merchants for questioning and arrested more than 60 leading opium offenders.⁠[12][8]

Charles Elliot, the British chief superintendent of trade, at first resisted but then advised the British merchants to hand their opium over to him, and on behalf of the British government surrendered 20,283 chests to the Qing authorities; the Fuzhou municipal government’s page gives 19,179 chests and 2,119 bags, and the English translation of Lin’s letter to Queen Victoria gives 20,183 chests. The surrender of opium by users and by merchants was completed on May 12 and May 18, 1839, respectively.⁠[12][8][13]

On May 23 British opium traders, among them Lancelot Dent, were deported; the next day Elliot ordered British subjects to leave the Thirteen Factories for Macao.⁠[12]

From June 3 to June 25, 1839, he personally oversaw the public destruction of the confiscated opium on the beach at Humen in Guangdong, a process that lasted 23 days.⁠[12][14][3]

He began the destruction vowing that he would not return as long as opium had not been wiped out; the Fuzhou municipal government’s page gives a slightly different wording of the same vow placing it after his appointment to Guangdong and before the surrender of the opium.⁠[3][8]

The quantity destroyed is given differently: about 20,000 chests weighing 2.3 million jin (catties) on the Hong Kong Chinese culture site, more than 2.3 million jin surrendered by the foreign merchants on the Palace Museum’s site, more than 2.37 million jin in a Xinhua report, more than 1.15 million kilograms on the National Development and Reform Commission’s site, and more than 2.37 million kilograms on the Fuzhou municipal government’s page.⁠[12][3][14][8][6]

The opium was unpacked, weighed and chopped, soaked with salt in stone pools, decomposed with lime, and the sludge was let out to sea at low tide; he did not burn it, because the ashes of burned opium could seep into the ground, where addicts could recover some of it. He kept eight chests as samples and sent the Daoguang Emperor a detailed account of the amounts surrendered and destroyed.⁠[12]

His diary records that he composed an ode apologizing to the sea god for polluting the ocean with the confiscated opium.⁠[1]

A 2026 Xinhua report links June 26, the day after the destruction was completed, with the international anti-drug day later set by the United NationsUnited NationsThe United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945 under the Charter of the United Nations. It has 193 Member States, and its headquarters are in New York City.Open the full entry; the United Nations General Assembly established June 26 as the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking by resolution 42/112 of December 7, 1987.⁠[3][15]

After reaching Canton he wrote to Queen Victoria, asking whether she would allow a substance as poisonous as opium into her own country, asking her to stop her subjects from bringing it to China, and urging her on moral grounds to stop the production of opium in India.⁠[1][9][16]

The letter came with a new law under which foreigners who brought opium to sell would have their principals beheaded and their accessories strangled; Chinese who sold opium faced death, and so did those who merely smoked it; foreigners who had brought opium by mistake and surrendered it within a grace period of a year and a half after the law took effect would be pardoned. The letter also argued that foreign countries could not exist a single day without China’s tea and rhubarb, while the goods foreigners brought were fit only for presents or amusement.⁠[16]

An English translation of the letter was printed in the Chinese Repository, vol. 8 (February 1840), pp. 497–503; in it Lin writes that “in your own country opium is prohibited with the utmost strictness and severity.”⁠[16]

An editorial note on the UCLA International Institute’s page says that most scholars do not believe the letter reached Queen Victoria.⁠[13]

During the anti-opium campaign in Canton he had the newspapers and books published by foreigners in Macao collected, set up a translation office and recruited people who could read English regardless of their background.⁠[17]

He arranged the translated Macao monthly (Aomen yuebao) material into five collections: On China, On Tea, On the Opium Ban, On the Use of Troops and On Conditions in Foreign Countries.⁠[17]

He had his staff translate a world geography by the British writer Murray and edited and polished it himself into the Sizhou zhi (Gazetteer of the Four Continents), which described the geography, history and politics of more than 30 countries; he also had a Western scholar’s work on international law translated as Geguo lüli and used it to rebut British demands concerning the surrender of opium and extraterritoriality; he also compiled the Huashi yiyan (What Foreigners Say about China).⁠[17][8]

At the age of 55 he began teaching himself English, memorizing common proper nouns, foreign currency units and the names of the British, American and other officials in Guangdong.⁠[17]

In August 1839, after the British refused to hand over seamen involved in the killing of a Chinese man, all British residents were ordered out of China.⁠[9]

On September 4, Charles Elliot sent three clippers to Kowloon to buy food by force; when Qing warships challenged them he ordered his men to fire, the Qing fleet and the shore forts returned fire, the British suffered casualties and Elliot himself was nearly killed. The Battle of Kowloon was directed on the Chinese side by Lai Enjue of the Dapeng brigade.⁠[18]

Between November 3 and 13 the British attacked Kwun Chung six times and were driven off by the Qing garrison. After the Battle of Kwun Chung he asked the emperor for permission to build a fort each at Tsim Sha Tsui and Kwun Chung; the Linchong fort (Kwun Chung Fort), which he ordered built on Kwun Chung hill in today’s Jordan area, stood on what is now Battery Street in Kowloon, which takes its name from it, although he himself never set foot in Hong Kong.⁠[18][3]

In the eleventh month of that year (traditional calendar) he halted Sino-British trade on imperial orders, and in the twelfth month he was appointed governor-general of Liangguang (Guangdong and Guangxi).⁠[8]

The First Opium War broke out in 1840. Failing to make headway in Guangdong and Fujian, British forces turned to Zhejiang, took Dinghai and then moved north against Dagu near Tianjin.⁠[8]

In August 1840 British naval forces arrived at Tianjin, demanding a reversal of the opium policy and the punishment of Lin; the Daoguang Emperor, calling the ban counterproductive, agreed to dismiss him.⁠[12][9]

After his dismissal he was sent to Zhejiang to help with coastal defence.⁠[6]

On the 17th day of the third month of 1841 (traditional calendar), his wife’s 53rd birthday, he wrote two regulated poems of seven-character lines expressing his love for his wife and children and his regret that his efforts to serve the country and its people had come to nothing; by then he had been dismissed over the opium ban and the resistance to Britain and was living apart from his wife, who had taken refuge from the war at Nanxiong with two of their sons.⁠[7]

In the fifth month of the twenty-first year of Daoguang (1841), the Daoguang Emperor, blaming the defeat in Guangdong on the previous officials, stripped him of his fourth-rank title and sentenced him to serve in exile at Ili, with the edict ordering him sent to Ili under heavier punishment to atone for his offences by service.⁠[8][19]

He set out for exile on July 14, 1841. Passing through Zhenjiang in August, he entrusted the Sizhou zhi translated under his direction in Canton, the Western materials he had collected and his own manuscripts to his friend Wei Yuan.⁠[19][17]

That year, after the Yellow River burst its banks, he was ordered back to Kaifeng to atone by helping to close the breach under Wang Ding’s direction.⁠[3]

His wife, Zheng Shuqing, moved the household from Fuzhou to Xi’an; he fell ill there and, after about four months of rest, set out for his place of exile, accompanied by his sons Congyi and Gongshu.⁠[5]

In the seventh month of the twenty-second year of Daoguang (1842, traditional calendar) he took leave of his wife and family in Xi’an and, in Zou Zizhen’s account, set out alone for Ili (the People’s Weekly article has his sons Congyi and Gongshu travelling with him); he wrote the poem Setting Out for My Place of Exile, Recited to My Family, two lines of which say that if something serves the country he will give his life for it, and will not shun or seek it for the sake of his own fortune or misfortune; Zou Zizhen’s article calls it his best-known poem.⁠[7][5]

In his Renyin Diary he recorded what he saw on the way: beyond Lanzhou the country was desolate; west of Anxi prefecture (now Guazhou county) the road was all sand and gravel, often with no water or grass for dozens of li; at Hongliuyuan, 160 li northwest of Guazhou, there were no red willows and not a single tree; and at Xiao Hongliuyuan, 50 li from Xingxingxia, he saw no red willows either.⁠[20]

On December 10, 1842, after a journey of 123 days, he reached his place of exile, the city of Huiyuan at Ili; an article from the Lin Zexu Memorial Hall’s website instead gives his arrival in Xinjiang as the 9th day of the eleventh month of the twenty-first year of Daoguang.⁠[21][19]

Aqiwusu, east of Huiyuan, had been farmland of the Eight Banners but had been abandoned for lack of water. In 1843 he studied the sources and course of the Ili River and directed the building of the Longkou canal, which drew water from the Hashi River: stone slopes had to be cut on the north bank, and dams, piles and stone fill built on the south bank, and after more than four months a canal six li long was finished. It came to be called Lin’s Canal (Lin gong qu).⁠[20]

With the canal, 33,350 mu were reclaimed at Sankeshu and Hongliuwan, and more than 160,100 mu at Alebusi.⁠[20]

In 1843 Ili suffered drought and then intense heat; in a letter to Li Xingyuan he wrote that the summer heat on the Ili that year was unlike anything before.⁠[20]

From the materials he had had translated he recognized the threat Russia posed to China, and he urged Buyantai, the military governor of Ili, to adopt military colonies that farmed and fought, so as to be prepared in advance. Chen Lingyun’s article says this shaped his defence thinking of resisting Britain and guarding against Russia and made him a forerunner of the modern frontier-defence (fangsai) school.⁠[19]

Assisting with land reclamation, and despite his age and poor health, he travelled from Ili across Xinjiang, thirty thousand li through the Western Regions in the phrase the article quotes, and surveyed eight cities of southern Xinjiang in person; the Fuzhou municipal government’s page says that in this period he surveyed southern Xinjiang himself, travelling 30,000 li.⁠[19][8]

Wang Zhiguo’s article places his survey of farmland in southern Xinjiang in 1843 and says he saw at first hand a harsh environment, impoverished people and depressed trade: many lived a whole day on two or three cold flatbreads, most were in rags and went barefoot in all seasons; Yarkand, Kashgar and Aksu, though busy trading centres, had fewer than three to five thousand merchants, and remote places such as Uqturpan and Khotan no more than about a thousand, all of whom came alone, none with their families.⁠[20]

At Turpan he recognized the earth pits on the ground as karez, saw that they tapped groundwater and reduced evaporation and suited local conditions but were too few, and encouraged people everywhere to dig wells and build channels, directing the work on the spot. A 2023 Guangming Daily report dates this to 1845 and quotes his diary’s remark that water travelling through tunnels underground was truly a marvel.⁠[20][22]

Local people named the karez and spinning wheels he promoted Lin’s wells (Lin gong jing) and Lin’s wheels (Lin gong che).⁠[19][22]

In Xinjiang he wrote poems about the wind and sand of the Gobi, describing a land where it never rained all year but the wind blew the desert sand into the air.⁠[20]

In the ninth month of the twenty-fifth year of Daoguang (1845, traditional calendar) he was recalled to the capital to await appointment, and in the eleventh month he was made acting governor-general of Shaanxi and Gansu with third-rank insignia; he had spent 38 months in Xinjiang.⁠[19][8][20]

He was appointed governor of Shaanxi in April 1846 and took up the post on August 30.⁠[19][8]

Shaanxi then bore the burden of military costs and indemnities and suffered a famine, and armed bands known as daoke joined local Muslims in risings at Weinan, Fuping, Sanyuan, Dali and Pucheng; he ordered the daoke severely suppressed and announced that he would recommend for reward the local officials who suppressed them effectively; he had more than a million shi of stored grain from Xi’an prefecture and elsewhere sold to the poor at stable prices, and three to four thousand of the destitute were taken in in the provincial capital alone; he also urged wealthy households to contribute, asked for a deferral of taxes, and proposed irrigation works for the Guanzhong plain, which were not carried out because of their cost.⁠[19]

Overwork made him ill, and he asked the court for three months’ leave for treatment. In one letter he wrote that he was already sixty-one; the previous noon, returning from reviewing drills at the parade ground, he had suddenly felt dizzy, been seized by coughing and brought up half a basin of blood, and the physician Qin Lichuan, summoned in haste, advised him to rest for a hundred days and take no part in outside affairs.⁠[19][5]

While recovering at the Shaanxi governor’s office, at 63, he wrote a deed dividing the family property among his three sons: each could receive only property worth 10,000 taels of silver, with no cash to divide, and he urged them to keep to their studies and spend sparingly. Zeng GuofanZeng GuofanZeng Guofan (1811–1872) was an official, military commander and Neo-Confucian scholar of the late Qing dynasty, the founder and commander of the Xiang (Hunan) Army. He led that army against the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom for more than a decade, then governed the Liangjiang provinces and Zhili and helped to begin the self-strengthening projects that brought Western machinery and technology to China.Open the full entry later wrote to his brother Zeng Guoquan that each of Lin’s three sons had received 6,000 strings of cash in the division, admiring that twenty years as a governor and governor-general had left so modest an estate and saying that it should be taken as a model.⁠[3]

In March 1847 the Qing court appointed him governor-general of Yunnan and Guizhou.⁠[19][8]

In office he was given the title of grand guardian of the heir apparent and the right to wear the peacock feather for pacifying the Muslim rebels in Yunnan and securing the frontier.⁠[19][1]

In Yunnan he proposed reforming mining administration, encouraging private mining and commercial operation.⁠[19]

In the tenth month of the twenty-seventh year of Daoguang (1847) his wife, Zheng Shuqing, died of illness at the age of 59, while he was serving as governor-general in Kunming.⁠[7]

In the autumn of the twenty-ninth year of Daoguang (1849), seriously ill, he asked to be relieved of office to recover at home and was granted a hundred days’ leave to return home for treatment, together with a gift of two taels of ginseng; in a letter of the 6th day of the seventh month (traditional calendar), written before he left, he said he planned to set out on the day before the Double Seventh festival. He reached Houguan in the third month of the following year.⁠[19][5]

He had wished to live with his eldest son in Beijing but could not afford a house there, so he returned to the old house his father had bought in Fuzhou and lived quietly.⁠[5]

Early in 1850, travelling home after leaving the governor-generalship of Yunnan and Guizhou, he passed through Changsha in Hunan, sent for Zuo ZongtangZuo ZongtangZuo Zongtang (1812–1885) was a statesman and military commander of the late Qing dynasty. Holding only the provincial degree, he joined the staff of the governor of Hunan, raised the Chu Army against the Taiping Rebellion and served as governor of Zhejiang and governor-general of Fujian and Zhejiang, of Shaanxi and Gansu and of Liangjiang, rising to grand secretary and grand councillor; from 1875 he directed the campaign in Xinjiang that defeated Yakub Beg, after which Xinjiang was made a province.Open the full entry, then still a provincial graduate, to talk about the affairs of the empire, and gave him his materials on Xinjiang.⁠[3]

In the ninth month of the thirtieth year of Daoguang (1850) the Qing court appointed him imperial commissioner to suppress the anti-Qing rising of the God Worshippers (the Taiping) in Guangxi; though ill, he set out from Fujian.⁠[19][8][9]

On November 22, 1850, he died of illness on the way, at the official lodging in Puning, Chaozhou, Guangdong, aged 66. Before the report of his death reached the capital, the court on November 27 ordered him to serve temporarily as governor of Guangxi.⁠[19][10][1]

In 1851, the first year of the Xianfeng reign, the Xianfeng Emperor granted him state sacrifices and burial, the posthumous title of grand tutor of the heir apparent and the posthumous name Wenzhong.⁠[11][8]

He and Zheng Shuqing raised three sons and three daughters to adulthood: the sons Ruzhou, Congyi and Gongshu, and daughters including Chentan and Puqing. By order of birth, an article in People’s Weekly calls Congyi the third son and Gongshu the fourth, a 2025 Fuzhou Daily report also calls Lin Congyi the third son, and the Fuzhou Evening News calls Lin Gongshu the youngest son.⁠[7][5][4][2]

He took no concubine while Zheng Shuqing was alive; a 2005 Jinling Evening News report says that he remarried after his wife’s death.⁠[5][10]

While he was imperial commissioner and governor-general of Liangguang, Zheng Shuqing stayed quietly at home, and when he was dismissed and exiled to Ili she stood by him. After his dismissal his student Zhao Yunting, indignant, waited for him on the road to exile and wanted to rally Lin’s students everywhere to protest on his behalf, for which Lin rebuked him severely; Zhao then went to Fuzhou to call on Zheng Shuqing and gave her the 500 taels of heating allowance he had received from the government. The People’s Weekly article quotes Lin’s letter home to show that he greatly admired his wife’s judgment in the matter.⁠[5]

His youngest son, Lin Gongshu, later advised on Taiwan affairs as a censor, but the Qing court did not adopt his proposals.⁠[2]

He wrote a set of maxims, the Ten Things of No Benefit (Shi wuyi), both as a standard for his own conduct and to teach his children.⁠[2]

The direct line descended from his eldest son, Lin Ruzhou, kept to the family precepts, studying but rarely entering politics, and the senior branch settled in Nanjing; a 2005 Jinling Evening News report says that because of their ancestor’s destruction of opium at Humen almost none of his direct descendants smoke.⁠[10]

The same report says that a descendant in Nanjing saw, as a child, a family account book recording rents collected by Lin Zexu.⁠[10]

Ling Qing, a fifth-generation descendant, served as China’s ambassador to the United Nations; in 2005 he and his wife visited Ching Leung Fat Yuen in Tuen Mun, Hong Kong, to examine a wooden couplet carved with Lin Zexu’s calligraphy.⁠[10][18]

Among descendants who went to Taiwan, Lin Changyong, a fifth-generation descendant, was a retired Kuomintang major general who returned to his ancestral home in 1991 at the age of 75; his brother Lin Chongyong, a former director of the Bank of China in Taiwan, wrote Lin Zexu zhuan (A Biography of Lin Zexu) and Shen Baozhen yu Fujian chuanzheng (Shen Baozhen and the Fujian Navy Yard), both published in Taiwan, and the biography won Taiwan’s Sun Yat-sen academic award in 1967.⁠[2]

By 2025 his descendants numbered more than 1,000 in China and abroad, down to the ninth generation. On August 29, 2025, more than 70 of them, in Fuzhou for events marking the 240th anniversary of his birth, paid their respects at his tomb at the foot of Jinshi hill on Tongpan Road and visited the ancestral home in Fuqing.⁠[4]

His writings include a treatise on water conservancy in the capital region (Jifu shuili yi), which notes that Taiwan produced more rice than any other prefecture of Fujian; the later collection Lin Zexu ji contains his memorials and diaries.⁠[2][20]

Charles W. Hayford, author of the BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry article, places him in the Statecraft school, a reform group that sought authority in antiquity for present-day reform and compiled practical knowledge, including geography and foreign history.⁠[1]

Wei Yuan later expanded the materials Lin had entrusted to him into the Haiguo tuzhi (Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms). A 2025 article from Southeast Net holds that Wei Yuan’s idea of learning the foreigners’ superior techniques in order to control them was inspired by Lin, who himself, after broadening his view of the world, proposed learning the enemy’s superior techniques in order to resist the enemy.⁠[17][3]

Between 1840 and 1842 he repeatedly stressed shipbuilding, cannon founding and naval training; the same article calls him one of the earliest advocates and practitioners of steamship building in modern China and says his example set off a wave of imitation of Western ships and guns in Guangdong, Zhejiang and other coastal areas.⁠[17]

Charles W. Hayford judges that, for all his experience, Lin did not grasp that his success would expose China to foreign penetration; he relied on the old precedent of playing outsiders against one another, did not understand that British demands for free trade and equality reflected a commercial empire challenging the Chinese world order, and believed that the British depended on Chinese tea and rhubarb. Hayford calls his approach morally aggressive and insulting to the British government, and says the only lesson Lin drew from the humiliation was to learn more about foreigners and import their technology.⁠[1]

Hayford adds that the Self-Strengthening Movement later adopted his reform programme, and that later revolutionaries who rejected Chinese culture still honoured him as a national hero for his courage in standing up to the British.⁠[1]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography calls him the first Chinese to advocate learning about the West and the Sizhou zhi the first book to give the Chinese reasonably reliable information about the West; the Southeast Net article calls the Sizhou zhi the first relatively complete and systematic world geography of modern China; the Fuzhou municipal government’s page calls him the first person in modern China to open his eyes to the world.⁠[9][17][8]

Jin Anqing, in his biography of Lin (Lin Wenzhong gong zhuan), describes the result of his irrigation work in Xinjiang as vast deserts turned into fertile land, with households in sight of one another and every field under cultivation.⁠[20]

His descendant Lin Chongyong summed up his life as one of taking on duties without seeking profit, exhausting himself without hankering after office, not retreating in the face of danger and not complaining when wronged.⁠[2]

Chinese state media describe him as a national hero.⁠[23][19]

The Lin Wenzhong Ancestral Hall in Fuzhou was built in 1905, the thirty-first year of the Guangxu reign, by his descendants, disciples and fellow townsmen; in 1982 it became the Lin Zexu Memorial Hall and was listed as a provincial-level protected cultural site of Fujian. Its side corridors display more than 20 ceremonial placards bearing his honours and titles, such as the right to ride a horse in the Forbidden City, governor-general of Huguang and of Liangguang and governor of Jiangsu and of Shaanxi; in 2025 the hall received more than 2.5 million visitors.⁠[11][3]

His former residence in Fuzhou officially opened to the public on August 24, 2025, together with an exhibition on Lin Zexu and Fuzhou, in the year of the 240th anniversary of his birth.⁠[23]

A bronze statue of Lin was unveiled in Fuzhou on June 3, 1995; Xi Jinping, then Party secretary of Fuzhou, attended the ceremony.⁠[17][3]

The Opium War Museum at Humen, Dongguan, stands on the site of Lin Zexu’s opium-destruction pools and the Humen forts and covers nearly 800,000 square metres; its branches include the Lin Zexu Memorial, which preserves the pools of 1839, the Sea Battle Museum, the Shajiao fort and the Weiyuan fort complex. In 2019 it received 5,845,000 visitors, the most of any museum in Guangdong.⁠[14][24]

There are memorials to him at Ili in Xinjiang, Pucheng in Shaanxi and the Lin Fung Temple in Macao, among other places; the Lin Zexu Memorial Museum of Macao stands on Avenida de Almirante Lacerda near the Lin Fung Temple. The Hong Kong Museum of History has a statue of him, and in 1998 Hong Kong hosted an international symposium on Lin Zexu, the Opium War and Hong Kong.⁠[3][25][18]

In Lin Ze Xu Square at East Broadway and Chatham Square in Chinatown, New York City, in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, stands a statue of him in bronze and granite by Li Wei-Si, dedicated in 1999; it is 18 feet 5 inches high and was donated by the Lin Zexu Foundation of U.S.A., and its inscription calls him a “PIONEER IN THE WAR AGAINST DRUGS.”⁠[26][1]

The People’s Weekly article also says that, during the Tongzhi to Guangxu period, Madame Tussauds in England made wax figures of Lin and his wife, Zheng Shuqing.⁠[5]