Opium Wars
Two mid-1800s wars in which Britain forced China to keep its markets open to opium, the opening blow of the century of humiliation.
Britain had a trade problem: it could not stop buying Chinese tea, and China wanted almost nothing British in return except silver. The East India Company solved the imbalance with narcotics. It grew opium in Bengal, sold it to smugglers, and by the 1830s was pushing tens of thousands of chests a year into China, hooking millions of users and reversing the flow of silver that had long run in China's favor. By the late 1830s the addiction crisis reached from dockhands to the imperial bureaucracy, and the silver draining out threatened the state's finances. When the Qing court finally moved to stamp out the trade, Britain answered with warships. The result was two wars, fought about two decades apart, that pried China open at gunpoint and began what the Chinese call the century of humiliation.
The first war
In 1839 the Daoguang Emperor sent Commissioner Lin Zexu to Canton, where he seized and destroyed roughly 1,000 tons of British opium. London treated the destruction of contraband as an insult to free trade and to British property, and dispatched an expeditionary force. What followed was less a war than a demonstration. The iron steamer Nemesis and modern naval guns shredded Qing war junks and shore forts, while Chinese armies organized for an earlier century could not close the gap. The 1842 Treaty of Nanking ended it: China ceded Hong Kong Island, opened five treaty ports including Shanghai, paid a 21-million-dollar indemnity, and scrapped the old trade monopoly. A follow-on treaty in 1843 added extraterritoriality, exempting foreigners from Chinese law.
The second war
One forced opening was not enough. In 1856 Britain, soon joined by France, seized on flimsy pretexts, the boarding of a ship called the Arrow and the killing of a French missionary, to launch a second war. This time Anglo-French troops pushed inland, and in 1860 they burned the Old Summer Palace outside Beijing, a deliberate humiliation that Chinese memory has never released. The Treaties of Tientsin and the 1860 Convention of Peking opened more ports, legalized the opium trade outright, ceded Kowloon, planted permanent foreign legations in Beijing, and let missionaries travel the interior.
The wound that stayed
Together the wars set a template: whenever China resisted, Western firepower would extract new concessions, each locked into a treaty. That is the origin of the phrase China's leaders still reach for. The century of humiliation, dated from 1839 to the Communist victory in 1949, became the founding grievance of modern Chinese nationalism, invoked by Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao alike. When Beijing today insists that no foreign power will ever again dictate to China, or marks the 1997 return of Hong Kong as a wound finally closed, it is answering a bill first presented by British gunboats over the right to sell opium.