Gold was the problem.
Specie, that is gold and silver, were the only trade "goods" China accepted "officially". If you wanted teas or silks or anything else, you had to pay in specie, usually silver. There was a silver mine called Potosi in what is now Bolivia whose operation was a fair approximation of hell on Earth. It existed almost solely to support the Spanish Empire's trade with China because China wouldn't accept anything else.
What you're continually failing to comprehend here is that China didn't want to trade in a normal sense. China didn't want to exchange one set of goods for another set of goods. China only wanted gold or silver for it's goods, the amount of gold and silver available to give China for it's goods was finite, and the Europeans were scrambling to find anything which could take the place of gold and silver.
You couldn't sell China linens or pepper or dyes or anything else in return for teas, silk, porcelain, etc. Officially, you had to pay China in specie for the goods you wanted. Specie was "disappearing" into China, there was no balance, and something had to happen sooner or later. That's why it took an
unofficial trade, an
illegal trade, to break China's official specie-only trading policy.
Europeans began illegally selling the Chinese opium, the Chinese illegally paid silver to those Europeans for the opium, illegally, and the Europeans then used that silver to legally buy other Chinese goods.
You can examine all the 1840s trade goods you want but none of them will work because you don't understand China's 1840s official trade policy. Officially China will not exchange Chinese goods for foreign goods and officially China will not pay out Chinese specie for foreign goods. Officially China can only be paid in foreign specie for Chinese goods. That's why an unofficial, an illegal, trade in opium developed in which Chinese specie bought foreign goods and was then used to buy Chinese goods.