The Opium Wars

In the early nineteenth century, opium from British India reached China in rising quantities, and silver began to leave China to pay for it. Opium is addictive, and its spread brought serious social harm.

The Qing government had banned opium for decades, but the smuggling grew. In 1839 the emperor sent the official Lin Zexu to Canton to end the trade. Lin made the foreign merchants surrender about twenty thousand chests of opium and had it destroyed at Humen: dissolved with salt and lime in pools dug by the shore, and washed out to sea.

War followed. A British expeditionary force reached China in 1840, and the First Opium War, fought from 1839 to 1842, ended in a Qing defeat.

The Treaty of Nanking (1842) opened five ports to British trade, required China to pay a large indemnity and ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain. It was among the first of the agreements China would later call the “unequal treaties.”

A second war followed, from 1856 to 1860, fought by Britain and France. Its settlement opened more ports and legalized the opium trade. In 1860 British and French troops entered Beijing. Both looted the emperor’s Old Summer Palace, the Yuanmingyuan; British troops then burned it.

In China, the period that began with the First Opium War is remembered as the “century of humiliation.”

Britain, meanwhile, had begun to grow tea in Assam, in India, in the 1830s.