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{{Short description|Two 19th-century conflicts between China and Western powers}}{{About||the 1967 conflict between marooned elements of the Chinese Nationalist Party and the Kingdom of Laos|1967 Opium War|other uses|Opium Wars (disambiguation)}}{{Use British English|date=March 2019}}{{Use dmy dates|date=March 2019}}

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United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland>United Kingdom{{flagicon image|Flag of the British East India Company (1801).svg}} East India Company}}}}First Opium War:{{ubl>{{flagicon imageQing China}}Second Opium War:{{ubl>{{flagdecoBritish Empire>{{flagdecoSecond French Empire>French Empire}}Second Opium War:{{ubl>{{flagicon imageQing China}}| image = {{multiple image }}The Opium Wars ({{zh|s=鸦片战争|t=鴉片戰爭}} Yāpiàn zhànzhēng) were two conflicts waged between China and Western powers during the mid-19th century. The First Opium War was fought from 1839 to 1842 between China and Britain. It was triggered by the Chinese government's campaign to enforce its prohibition of opium, which included destroying opium stocks owned by British merchants and the British East India Company. The British government responded by sending a naval expedition to force the Chinese government to pay reparations and allow the opium trade.BOOK, Chen, Song-Chuan,weblink Merchants of War and Peace, 2017-05-01, Hong Kong University Press, 10.5790/hongkong/9789888390564.001.0001, 978-988-8390-56-4, The Second Opium War was waged by Britain and France against China from 1856 to 1860, and consequently resulted in China being forced to legalise opium.JOURNAL, Feige1, Miron2, Chris1, Jeffrey A.2, 2008, The opium wars, opium legalization and opium consumption in China,weblink Applied Economics Letters, 15, 12, 911–913, 10.1080/13504850600972295, Scopus, In each war, the superior military advantages enjoyed by European forces led to several easy victories over the Chinese military, with the consequence that China was compelled to sign the unequal treaties to grant favourable tariffs, trade concessions, reparations and territory to Western powers. The two conflicts, along with the various treaties imposed during the "century of humiliation", weakened the Chinese government's authority and forced China to open specified treaty ports (including Shanghai) to Western merchants.WEB,weblink A Short History of the Opium Wars, Civilizations Past And Present, Chapter 29: "South And East Asia, 1815–1914", Schaffer Library of Drug Policy, Taylor Wallbank, Bailkey, Jewsbury, Lewis, Hackett, 1992, ENCYCLOPEDIA,weblink Chinese history: Opium Wars, Kenneth Pletcher, Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 16 April 2024, In addition, China ceded sovereignty over Hong Kong to the British Empire, which maintained control over the region until 1997. During this period, the Chinese economy also contracted slightly as a result of the wars, though the Taiping Rebellion and Dungan Revolt had a much larger economic effect.WEB, Over 2000 years of economic history, in one chart, 15 September 2017, Jeff, Desjardins, World Economic Forum,weblink 28 November 2021,

First Opium War

The First Opium War broke out in 1839 between China and Britain and was fought over trading rights (including the right of free trade) and Britain's diplomatic status among Chinese officials. In the eighteenth century, China enjoyed a trade surplus with Europe, trading porcelain, silk, and tea in exchange for silver. By the late 17th century, the British East India Company (EIC) expanded the cultivation of opium in the Bengal Presidency, selling it to private merchants who transported it to China and covertly sold it on to Chinese smugglers.NEWS,weblink Opium trade – History & Facts, Encyclopedia Britannica, 2018-07-03, en, By 1797, the EIC was selling 4,000 chests of opium (each weighing 77 kg) to private merchants per annum.BOOK, The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another, Hanes, Wiliam Travis III, Sanello, Frank, Sourcebooks, 2004, 978-1402201493, United States, 21, 24, 25,weblink In earlier centuries, opium was utilised as a medicine with anesthetic qualities, but new Chinese practices of smoking opium recreationally increased demand tremendously and often led to smokers developing addictions. Successive Chinese emperors issued edicts making opium illegal in 1729, 1799, 1814, and 1831, but imports grew as smugglers and colluding officials in China sought profit.WEB,weblink A Century of International Drug Control, UNODC.org, Some American merchants entered the trade by smuggling opium from Turkey into China, including Warren Delano Jr., the grandfather of twentieth-century American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Francis Blackwell Forbes; in American historiography this is sometimes referred to as the Old China Trade.NEWS,weblink The Opium War's Secret History, Meyer, Karl E., The New York Times, 28 June 1997, 2018-07-03, en, By 1833, the Chinese opium trade soared to 30,000 chests. British and American merchants sent opium to warehouses in the free-trade port of Canton, and sold it to Chinese smugglers.Haythornthwaite, Philip J., The Colonial Wars Source Book, London, 2000, p.237. {{ISBN|1-84067-231-5}}In 1834, the EIC's monopoly on British trade with China ceased, and the opium trade burgeoned. Partly concerned with moral issues over the consumption of opium and partly with the outflow of silver, the Daoguang Emperor charged Governor General Lin Zexu with ending the trade. In 1839, Lin published in Canton an open letter to Queen Victoria requesting her cooperation in halting the opium trade. The letter never reached the Queen.{{sfnb|Fay|1975|p= 143}} It was later published in The Times as a direct appeal to the British public for their cooperation.{{sfnb|Platt|2018|p= online}} An edict from the Daoguang Emperor followed on 18{{nbsp}}March,{{sfn|Hanes|Sanello|2002|p=43}} emphasising the serious penalties for opium smuggling that would now apply henceforth. Lin ordered the seizure of all opium in Canton, including that held by foreign governments and trading companies (called factories),Haythornthwaite, 2000, p.237. and the companies prepared to hand over a token amount to placate him.BOOK, Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another, Hanes, W. Travis, Sanello, Frank, Frank Sanello, 9781402201493,weblink registration, 2002, Sourcebooks, {{page needed|date=January 2022}} Charles Elliot, Chief Superintendent of British Trade in China, arrived 3 days after the expiry of Lin's deadline, as Chinese troops enforced a shutdown and blockade of the factories. The standoff ended after Elliot paid for all the opium on credit from the British government (despite lacking official authority to make the purchase) and handed the 20,000 chests (1,300 metric tons) over to Lin, who had them destroyed at Humen.WEB,weblink China Commemorates Anti-opium Hero, 4 June 2009, 18 March 2014, dead,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20131114033733weblink">weblink 14 November 2013, dmy-all, Elliott then wrote to London advising the use of military force to resolve the dispute with the Chinese government. A small skirmish occurred between British and Chinese warships in the Kowloon Estuary on 4 September 1839. After almost a year, the British government decided, in May 1840, to send a military expedition to impose reparations for the financial losses experienced by opium traders in Canton and to guarantee future security for the trade. On 21 June 1840, a British naval force arrived off Macao and moved to bombard the port of Dinghai. In the ensuing conflict, the Royal Navy used its superior ships and guns to inflict a series of decisive defeats on Chinese forces.Tsang, Steve (2007). A Modern History of Hong Kong. I. B. Tauris. pp. 3–13, 29. {{ISBN|1-84511-419-1}}.The war was concluded by the Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing) in 1842, the first of the Unequal treaties between China and Western powers.Treaty of Nanjing inBritannica. The treaty ceded the Hong Kong Island and surrounding smaller islands to Britain, and established five cities as treaty ports open to Western traders: Shanghai, Canton, Ningbo, Fuzhou, and Xiamen (Amoy).Haythornthwaite 2000, p. 239. The treaty also stipulated that China would pay a twenty-one million dollar payment to Britain as reparations for the destroyed opium, with six million to be paid immediately, and the rest through specified installments thereafter.Treaty Of Nanjing (Nanking), 1842 on the website of the US-China Institute at University of Southern Carolina. Another treaty the following year gave most favoured nation status to Britain and added provisions for British extraterritoriality, making Britain exempt from Chinese law. France secured several of the same concessions from China in the Treaty of Whampoa in 1844.BOOK, Xiaobing Li, China at War: An Encyclopedia,weblink 2012, ABC-CLIO, 468, 9781598844160, File:Canton from the Heights.jpg|British bombardment of Canton from the surrounding heights, 29 May 1841. Watercolour painting by Edward H. Cree (1814–1901), Naval Surgeon to the Royal Navy.File:98th Foot at Chinkiang.jpg|The 98th Regiment of Foot at the attack on Chin-Kiang-Foo (Zhenjiang), 21 July 1842, resulting in the defeat of the Manchu government. Watercolour by military illustrator Richard Simkin (1840–1926).

Second Opium War

File:Capture of the Peiho Forts.jpg|thumb|upright=1.4|Depiction of the 1860 battle of Taku Forts. Book illustration from 1873.]]In 1853, northern China was convulsed by the Taiping Rebellion, which established its capital at Nanjing. In spite of this, a new Imperial Commissioner, Ye Mingchen, was appointed at Canton, determined to stamp out the opium trade, which was still technically illegal. In October 1856, he seized the Arrow, a ship claiming British registration, and threw its crew into chains. Sir John Bowring, Governor of British Hong Kong, called up Rear Admiral Sir Michael Seymour's East Indies and China Station fleet, which, on 23 October, bombarded and captured the Pearl River forts on the approach to Canton and proceeded to bombard Canton itself, but had insufficient forces to take and hold the city. On 15 December, during a riot in Canton, European commercial properties were set on fire and Bowring appealed for military intervention. The execution of a French missionary inspired support from France.WEB, MIT Visualizing Cultures,weblink 2023-09-09, visualizingcultures.mit.edu, The United States and Russia also intervened in the war.Britain and France now sought greater concessions from China, including the legalization of the opium trade, expanding of the transportation of coolies to European colonies, opening all of China to British and French citizens and exempting foreign imports from internal transit duties.BOOK, Zhihong Shi, Central Government Silver Treasury: Revenue, Expenditure and Inventory Statistics, ca. 1667–1899, 2016, BRILL, 978-90-04-30733-9, 33, The war resulted in the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin (Tianjin), in which the Chinese government agreed to pay war reparations for the expenses of the recent conflict, open a second group of ten ports to European commerce, legalize the opium trade, and grant foreign traders and missionaries rights to travel within China.This also included China being required to bend to Western diplomatic behaviors instead of their normal way of conducting business through a tribute system. This treaty led to the era in Chinese history known as the "Century of Humiliation", this term referring to how China lost control of many territories to its enemies after being forced into treaties which were unfair in their own regard. After a second phase of fighting which included the sack of the Old Summer Palace and the occupation of the Forbidden City palace complex in Beijing, the treaty was confirmed by the Convention of Peking in 1860.{{citation needed|date=January 2022}}

The impact of the Opium War on cultural relics

In February 1860, the British and French imperialist authorities again appointed Elgin and Grotto as plenipotentiaries respectively, leading more than 15,000 British troops and about 7,000 French troops to expand the war against China. The British and French forces invaded Beijing, and the Qing emperor fled to Chengde. The British and French forces broke into the Old Summer Palace, looted jewelry, and burned it. Among the cultural relics that were looted were the well-known Old Summer Palace bronze heads.File:Circle of Animals Zodiac Heads (49687077127).jpg|thumb|Old Summer Palace bronze headsOld Summer Palace bronze headsOn the morning of October 7, the French army broke into the Old Summer Palace and began to rob it.JOURNAL, July 2018, Internationale Studienergebnisse,weblink Physiopraxis, 16, 7/08, 16–20, 10.1055/a-0603-1331, 1439-023X, British soldiers who arrived in the afternoon also joined the robbery, and the most precious things in the Old Summer Palace were looted. All twelve bronze statues of animal heads began to be lost overseas.JOURNAL, May 2006, Health Canada has warned consumers against using Nasutra because it has been found to contain sildenafil.,weblink Inpharma Weekly, en, 1537, 21, 10.2165/00128413-200615370-00054, 1173-8324, On October 18, the Old Summer Palace was burned down by British soldiers, and France refused to provide aid. The fire burned for three days and nights, razing the buildings of the Old Summer Palace to the ground and destroying nearby royal properties.As of December 2020, seven of the twelve bronze statues have been found and returned to China. The whereabouts of the remaining five are still unknown. NEWS, 2020-12-02, China: Looted horse head returns to Beijing's Old Summer Palace,weblink 2024-05-07, en-GB,

See also

• Destruction of opium at Humen
• History of opium in China

References

{{Reflist}}

Cited references and further reading

• Beeching, Jack. The Chinese Opium Wars (Harvest Books, 1975)
• BOOK, Fay, Peter Ward, 1975, The Opium War, 1840–1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century and the War by Which They Forced Her Gates Ajar, University of North Carolina Press,
• Gelber, Harry G. Opium, Soldiers and Evangelicals: Britain's 1840–42 War with China, and its Aftermath. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
• Hanes, W. Travis and Frank Sanello. The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another (2014)
• Kitson, Peter J. "The Last War of the Romantics: De Quincey, Macaulay, the First Chinese Opium War". Wordsworth Circle (2018) 493.
• Lovell, Julia. The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China(2011).
• Marchant, Leslie R. "The War of the Poppies", History Today (May 2002) Vol. 52 Issue 5, pp 42–49, online popular history
• BOOK, Platt, Stephen R.,weblink Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age, New York, Knopf, 2018, 9780307961730, 556 pp.
  • Kenneth Pomeranz, "Blundering into War" (review of Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age, Vintage), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 10 (6 June 2019), pp. 38–41.
• Polachek, James M., The inner opium war (Harvard Univ Asia Center, 1992).
• BOOK, Wakeman, Frederic E.,weblink 1966, Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–1861, University of California Press, Berkeley, 0520212398,
• Waley, Arthur, ed. The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes (1960).
• Wong, John Y. Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism, and the Arrow War (1856–1860) in China. (Cambridge UP, 2002)
• Yu, Miles Maochun. "Did China Have a Chance to Win the Opium War?" Military History in the News, July 3, 2018.

External links

• "The Opium Wars", BBC Radio 4 discussion with Yangwen Zheng, Lars Laamann, and Xun Zhou (In Our Time, 12 April 2007)

{{British colonial campaigns}}{{Chinese conflicts}}