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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.
The Second Battle of Taku Forts (Chinese: 第二次大沽口之戰) was a failed Anglo-French attempt to seize the Taku Forts along the Hai River in Tianjin, China, in June 1859 during the Second Opium War. A chartered American steamship arrived on scene and assisted the French and British in their attempted suppression of the forts.
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.
In 'Smoke and Ashes,' Amitav Ghosh draws comparisons between America's modern opioid crisis and the West's flooding of China with opium in the 18th century.
The Treaty of Nanking was the peace treaty which ended the First Opium War (1839–1842) between Great Britain and the Qing dynasty of China on 29 August 1842. It was the first of what the Chinese later termed the "unequal treaties".
Historical accounts suggest that opium first arrived in China during the Tang dynasty (618–907) as part of the merchandise of Arab traders. [10] Later on, Song Dynasty (960–1279) poet and pharmacologist Su Dongpo recorded the use of opium as a medicinal herb: "Daoists often persuade you to drink the jisu water, but even a child can prepare the yingsu soup."
After the First Opium War in 1840 China was in a shaky situation due to onerous conditions of the ratified peace treaty and inner sociopolitical conflict within the nation: the weakening of the power of the Manchu emperors led to an open Taiping Rebellion and, most importantly, formation of the Taiping State, with which the government fought for many years ever since. [2]
It was the second major conflict in the Opium Wars, which were fought over the right to import opium to China, and resulted in a second defeat for the Qing and the forced legalisation of the opium trade. It caused many Chinese officials to believe that conflicts with the Western powers were no longer traditional wars, but part of a looming ...