Opium Wars: Great Britain vs China - Animated History

Описание: Opium Wars: two armed conflicts waged between the Qing and Western countries, namely Britain.

In the 18th century, through the Canton System, China enjoyed a favorable trade balance with Great Britain: exporting porcelain, silk, and tea in exchange for silver. This trade, on the contrary, was not balanced on the side of Britain, as millions of pounds of silver were flowing out of the British Empire and into China, forcing it to seek ways to counter-trade, and then they did: Opium. With the cultivation of opium in British territories in Bengal expanded, Britain started exporting opium from British-controlled India to China.

Opium had been used for medicinal purposes in China for centuries; however, by the early 19th century, the recreational use of opium skyrocketed, followed by an addiction crisis and serious social and economic disruption in China. Under these circumstances, a ban on both the production and the importation of opium was attempted, and smoking opium was outlawed. However, these actions could not halt the opium trade.

By 1836, the Chinese government implemented more serious measures: opium dens were closed and many Chinese dealers were executed. On top of that, on June 3rd 1839, 1,300 metric tons of illegal opium seized from British traders were destroyed at Humen under the aegis of Lin Zexu. The British government was extremely insulted by Lin’s action, and took it as a sign of hostility.

In July, some drunken British sailors brutally murdered a Chinese man, but were not sentenced under the Chinese extradition. In response to this reprehensible incident, Lin halted the British food supply and ordered the Portuguese to expel all British from Macau, forcing them to move to a barren island off the coast (present-day Hong Kong). Taken together, these actions raised the tensions between two sides, and in November 1839, Chinese warships clashed with British merchantmen on the Pearl River estuary in Hong Kong, leading to the outbreak of the First Opium War.

In early 1840, the British government decided to use military force against the Chinese. Their first hostile action was sending warships and merchantmen to Hong Kong, and then proceeding up the Pearl River estuary to Canton. Within the next year, the British forces with its naval and gunnery power inflicted a series of decisive defeats on the Chinese Empire.

After months of negotiations and fighting, in late August, 1942, the British managed to capture Nanking, putting an end to the war with the Treaty of Nanking. The treaty forced China to cede Hong Kong Island to Britain, pay an indemnity of twenty-one million dollars to Britain, and opened five treaty ports at Shanghai, Canton, Ningpo, Fuzhou, and Amoy to British merchants. The supplementary Treaty of the Bogue in 1843 gave ‘most favoured nation status’ to the British Empire and added provisions for British extraterritoriality.

The Second Opium War resulted from the failure of the Nanking Treaty to satisfy British goals of improved trade and diplomatic relations. In early October 1856, some Chinese marines in Canton seized a British-operated cargo ship Arrow, arresting several Chinese crew members. This incident gave the British the excuse they had been waiting for to use military forces against China once again. But this time, Britain had French support as the murder of a French missionary in China forced France to side with the British.

In early 1858, having already captured Canton, French-British forces headed to Tianjin. Once arriving at Tianjin, a treaty was once again proposed, and unsurprisingly, for the Chinese, it included even more unequal treaties than the last one. The Treaty of Tianjin included the opening of 10 more Chinese ports to foreign trade, permission for foreign legations in Beijing and Christian missionary activity and the legalization of the opium trade.

The humiliating defeat of the Qing army by a relatively small British-French military force was a shocking blow to the once powerful and prosperous Qing Empire. The Opium Wars not only provided convincing evidence of weakened China but also made a further contribution to this weakening. And most importantly, the conflicts were believed to contribute to the ending of the Qing dynasty and also China’s 5,000-year imperial dynastic system, and the beginning of what is now referred to in China as the “Century of Humiliation”.

#china #history #animation
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