Like most things, it's a little more complicated than the packaged narrative. Prior to the introduction of opium to the Canton trade, pretty much all of the goods that were imported from China by foreigners were paid for with silver - mostly from Mexico and Potosi or Japan - as there was very little that Europeans could find or produce that would sell in China's largely self-sufficient economy[1]. By the late 1700s, Britain, Portugal and the Netherlands were shipping millions of silver Dollars into Canton for silks and tea and such every year. China vacuumed up so much of the world's silver supply that it severely distorted the exchange rates in the Qing bimetallic currency system. Up until the opium trade got going, China had a massive, massive trade surplus. A lot of that wealth did get squandered - probably the poster child would be Heshen[2], a Manchu official that siphoned off a fortune estimated at fifteen times the annual tax revenue of the Qing Empire, or Wu Bingjian - one of the primary Chinese merchants in the Cohong system, who was so wealthy he personally contributed a third of the indemnity stipulated in the Treaty of Nanking[3].
[1] I don't have a link, but it is hilarious reading some of the early official records of the English East India company, and their utter inability to find anyone who would buy the woolens they initially tried shipping as cargo.