The opium trades

[Rob_Hugo@PortNW]

The Anglo-Chinese opium wars were direct reult of China's isolationist and exclusionary trade policy with the West. Confucian China's attempts to keep foreign ideas resulted in highly restrictive trade. Prior to 1830, Guanzhou (Canton) was the only port open to British and American merchants only to trade on silver. Western merchants begn importing greater amounts of cheap opium, a commodity with a growing demand. Despite the imperial government had long prohibited the drug except for medicinal use, very soon the Chinese were eroding their reserves of Carolus, Spanish and Mexican silver pesos coins to pay for the ever increasing import of opium from India and Turkey. Eventually, the Emperor Dao guang (1821-1850) of the Qing dynasty ordered to confiscate and destroy all imports of opium. The Emperor's special anti-opium commissioner Lin Ze-xu ( 1785-1850), calculated that in 1839 Chinese opium smokers consumed 100 million taels worth of the drug while the entire spending of the Imperial government that year spent 40 million taels. He reportedly concluded IIf we continue to allow this trade to flourish, in a few years we will find ourselves not ony with no soldiers to resist the enemy, but also with no money to equip the army" A hotbed of vice, bribery, and disloyalty to the Emperor's authority, the port of Canton would be the flashpoint for the clash between China and Great Britain. When Lin Ze-xu took swift action against the foreign merchants and their Chinese accomplices by making some 1600 arrests, confiscating 11,000 pounds of opium and burning publicly 20,000 crates of imported opium, despite attempts by the British Superintendent of Trade to negotiate a compromise. Elliot ordered the Royal navy to destroy Chinese vessels near Guangzhou and defeating the Chinese defenders. These losses to the foreign devils produced the undermining and eventual falling of the Qing Dynasty. The British government swiftly forced the Chinese to sign the first of of a series of "unequal" treaties. In August 1842, the Treaty of Nanking, signed aboard a British warship at the Yangtze river, ceded the island of Hong Kong to Great Britain, opened five "treaty" ports (Canton, Aoy, Foochow, Shanghai, and Ningbo) to Western trade and residence, granted Great Britain most-favored nation status for trade, paid nine million dollars in reparations for the opium Lin Ze-xu had destroyed. Finally, after many more charges, perhaps most important to China's loss of nationhood, the Manchu surrendered to the demands to favor Western merchants were not longer accountable to China's laws, but rather to those of their mother countries. In 1844, the United States and France obtained similar concessions, partitioning the world's most populous nation by the numerically inferior but technologically superior Western powers. France and Russia intervened in 1857-1860 and participated in additional partitioning and punishing China, opening more ports of Hankou, Niuzuang, Danshui, and Nanjing to foreign vessels, as were th waters of th Yangtze, and foreign missionaries were free to proselyte. Finally, China ceded the port of Kowloon to Great Britain. The sum of China's humiliation led directly to the fall of the Manchu dynasty and the social upheavals that precipitated thr Boxer Rebellion of 1900.
What had begun as a conflict of interests between English desire for profits from trade and the Confucian ideal of self-sufficiency and exclusion of corrupting influences resuletd in the partitioning of China by the Western power, humiliating defeats on land and sea by technologically superior forces, the traditional values of a culture undermined by Christian missionaries and rampant trading of foreign produced opium. No wonder the Boxer rebels' chief goal was to purify and recover their nation by the utter annihilation of all "foreign devils."
http://www.victorianweb.org/history/empire/opiumwars.

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