Tea, silver, and the East India Company's opium trade

If the tea trade was profitable, why did the East India Company sell opium to finance it?

Tea and silk had to be bought with expensive silver. Selling comparatively cheap opium provided a way to obtain silver in China and pay for those exports.

The panel moves from the scale of nineteenth-century China to the commercial pressures behind Britain's opium trade. Tea and silk were profitable imports, but Chinese sellers demanded payment in silver. That requirement drew bullion toward China and made the trade costly for British interests. The East India Company used opium sales to obtain silver and finance the outward flow of tea. The passage frames the resulting conflict as a war fought to sustain the narcotics trade rather than suppress it.