Opium Wars
Two wars in which Britain forced China to accept the opium trade, beginning what China calls the century of humiliation.
The Opium Wars were two wars between Britain and China, the first from 1839 to 1842 and the second from 1856 to 1860. Britain fought them to keep China's markets open to foreign trade, above all the trade in opium. China lost both wars. The treaties that followed forced China to cede Hong Kong, open more than a dozen ports to foreign merchants, legalize the opium trade, and let foreigners live on Chinese soil under their own laws. In China, these wars mark the start of the century of humiliation, a phrase that still shapes Chinese politics today.
How the opium trade led to the First Opium War
By the early 1800s, Britain had a trade problem with China. The British were buying huge quantities of Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain, but China wanted almost nothing Britain made in return. The only payment China would accept was silver, and silver was draining steadily out of Britain.
The East India Company found a way around this. It grew opium in Bengal, in eastern India, and sold it to private traders who smuggled it into southern China through the port of Canton. The Company kept its hands officially clean, but it controlled the supply. By the 1830s, tens of thousands of chests of opium were entering China every year. The drug addicted millions of users, from dockworkers to officials in the imperial court. The flow of silver reversed: instead of running into China to pay for tea, it was now running out of China to pay for opium. The Qing government was losing both its people's health and its treasury.
The Daoguang Emperor decided to act. In 1839 he sent Lin Zexu, one of the most respected officials in the empire, to the port of Canton to shut the trade down. Lin was a scholar-official known for his honesty and his willingness to confront powerful interests. He had spent nearly two decades as an official in China's provinces. When he arrived in Canton, he blockaded the foreign trading houses, confined the merchants inside, and refused to release them until they surrendered their opium. They handed over roughly 1,000 tons. Lin had it mixed with salt and lime and flushed into the sea. He also wrote a letter to Queen Victoria, asking how she would feel if foreign merchants sold poison to her own people. The letter was never delivered.
The British government treated the destruction of the opium as an attack on British property. In 1840, London sent an expeditionary force. The force included the iron-hulled steamer Nemesis, one of the first iron warships used in combat. The Nemesis and the Royal Navy's modern guns destroyed Chinese war junks and shore forts along the coast. China's armies were organized for an older kind of warfare and could not match them.
The war ended with the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, the first of what the Chinese call the unequal treaties. China ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain, opened five ports to foreign trade including Shanghai, and paid an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars. A second treaty in 1843 added extraterritoriality: foreigners in China would be tried under their own countries' laws, not Chinese law.
The Second Opium War and the burning of the Summer Palace
In 1856, Britain launched a second war, with France joining soon after. The stated reasons were minor: Chinese officials had boarded a British-registered ship called the Arrow, and a French missionary had been killed in the interior. The real aim was to force China to open more ports and accept permanent foreign embassies in Beijing.
Anglo-French troops pushed deep into northern China. In October 1860, they reached Beijing and burned the Old Summer Palace, a vast complex of gardens, pavilions, and art collections that the Qing emperors had built over more than a century. The British envoy who ordered the burning was Lord Elgin. His father, a generation earlier, had taken the Parthenon marbles from Athens. The younger Elgin ordered the palace destroyed as punishment for the torture and killing of members of a British and French delegation who had been seized under a flag of truce.
The war ended with the Tientsin treaties and the 1860 Peking Convention. Britain and France used these treaties to open more Chinese ports and to legalize the opium trade outright. Britain took the southern tip of Kowloon, the peninsula across the harbor from Hong Kong Island. The treaties also established permanent foreign embassies in Beijing and gave Christian missionaries the right to travel freely through China's interior.
Why the Opium Wars still matter in China
The Opium Wars began the period Chinese leaders call the century of humiliation, running from 1839 to 1949 in which foreign powers carved up Chinese territory and imposed their terms on a weakened state. Many Chinese leaders since have used the phrase. Sun Yat-sen invoked it to rally support for overthrowing the Qing dynasty. Chiang Kai-shek invoked it during the war against Japan. Mao invoked it to justify the Communist revolution.
The phrase is not only historical. The Chinese government today treats the century of humiliation as a founding story of modern China, a reason why the country must never again let a foreign power dictate to it. When Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, 155 years after the Treaty of Nanking, Beijing treated the ceremony as the closing of an open wound.
The wars also set a pattern that repeated through the rest of the nineteenth century. Whenever China resisted foreign demands, Western and later Japanese forces used military power to force new concessions, each written into a treaty. That pattern continued through the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and ended only when the Communist Party took power in 1949.