The Opium Wars: When an Empire Used an Addictive Drug to Open China

At the end of the eighteenth century, British merchants bought tea, silk, and porcelain from China, while the Qing court demanded payment in silver. Silver flowed out of Europe and tea flowed into London. The East India Company needed a product it could sell back into China to pull the silver back. It found that product in opium grown in Bengal.

In 1839, Qing official Lin Zexu seized more than 20,000 chests of British opium at Humen and destroyed it. Britain did not stop the trade. Its fleet went to the Chinese coast, attacked forts, took Hong Kong, and forced the Qing government to sign the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. A war later described as “free trade” began with an empire demanding the right to sell a drug that China had banned.