The Opium Wars
Britain fights to keep selling a narcotic, and China's decline is dated from here.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 21 years
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Britain's trade deficit with China is solved by selling Indian opium; when Commissioner Lin destroys the stock at Canton in 1839, Britain goes to war. Defeat forces the treaty ports, extraterritoriality, an indemnity and the cession of Hong Kong, followed by a second war and the burning of the Summer Palace in 1860. In China the period is known as the century of humiliation, and it frames Chinese foreign policy to this day.