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The Opium Wars (simplified Chinese: 鸦片战争; traditional Chinese: 鴉片戰爭; pinyin: 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.
Most notably, the powerful series of forts at Humen were well positioned to stop an invader from proceeding upriver to Guangzhou, but it had not been considered that an enemy would attack and destroy the forts themselves, as the British did during the war. [216] At the start of the war the Qing army consisted of over 200,000 soldiers, with ...
The war followed on from the First Opium War. In 1842, the Treaty of Nanking granted an indemnity and extraterritoriality to Britain, the opening of five treaty ports, and the cession of Hong Kong Island. The failure of the treaty to satisfy British goals of improved trade and diplomatic relations led to the Second Opium War (1856–1860). [8]
These later became known as the Unequal Treaties, while the Opium Wars, according to Chinese historians, represented the start of China's "Century of humiliation". The opium trade faced intense enmity from the later British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. [34]
The century of humiliation was a period in Chinese history beginning with the First Opium War (1839–1842), and ending in 1945 with China (then the Republic of China) emerging out of the Second World War as one of the Big Four and established as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, or alternately, ending in 1949 with the ...
The Treaty itself contained no provision for the legalization of the opium trade. Stephen R. Platt writes that such a term would have provided the opponents of Lord Palmerston, who headed the Conservative government that launched the war, with a seeming confirmation for their claim that the war was fought to support the opium trade. [18]
A model of the destruction of opium at Humen. Displayed at the Hong Kong Museum of History. Commissioner Lin and the destruction of opium at Humen, June 1839. The destruction of opium at Humen began on 3 June 1839, lasted for 23 days, and involved the destruction of 1,000 long tons (1,016 t) of illegal opium seized from British traders under the aegis of Lin Zexu, an Imperial Commissioner of ...
The number of people using the drug in China grew rapidly, to the point that the trade imbalance shifted in the foreign countries' favor. In 1839 matters came to a head when Chinese official Lin Zexu tried to end the opium trade altogether by destroying a large amount of opium in Canton, thereby triggering the First Opium War.