Significance of the Opium Wars

Alsina González
Specialist journalist and researcher

“Religion is people's opium” said Karl Marx in 1844, and he said it for a very clear reason: faith, like drugs, is capable of alienating people from reality, transporting them to a happier imaginary world. Therefore, its control is important.

But this phrase, which is intended for the interlocutor to focus on the religious factor, makes us forget about the other, of drugs, and more specifically of opium, now less known and used, but once a widely used drug and important.

To such an extent that, precisely, opium was one of the reasons that led China and Great Britain to face each other on the battlefields.

The so-called Opium Wars were two armed conflicts that occurred between Great Britain (with the support of various other powers) and the Chinese Empire in the mid-19th century.

The main causes of these clashes are geopolitical (of them, the British benefited from the cession of Hong Kong), and economic, with the opium trade being one of the main among the latter, although not the only.

At the beginning of the 19th century, China was a country still very closed in on itself, seeking to protect itself from foreign interventionism.

At the same time, the Western powers, in the midst of their colonial expansion, looked eagerly at China, both for the possibility of obtaining domains and for commercial possibilities.

The problem was the balance of this trade with the Asian giant. In Great Britain, for example, Chinese porcelains and silks were all the rage, and of course tea (punctual at five in the afternoon!), while the British had little that the Chinese could be interested in or could afford to buy in large amounts.

The money flowed mostly in a address: from Great Britain to the Chinese coffers. And that was not liked in London, as it was not liked in any other country with colonial desires that wanted to get rich.

One of the few products that Great Britain could sell to China was opium, produced on a massive scale in India.

But opium, like any other drug, was harmful to the population and also for the Chinese economy, which led the government of that country to prohibit the production, importation and consumption of opinion in 1829.

As in all prohibition, the black market and the smuggling of opium produced by foreigners worked at full capacity, until in 1839 the Chinese, fed up with the British interventionism, expelled the merchants of that nationality from their territory, as responsible for the entry of opium and its illegal sale in the country.

Said merchants protested to the government of his majesty, which did not take long to prepare its troops for war. In fact, they had been looking for an excuse for a long time, and the destruction of opium shipments and the expulsion of their merchants provided it.

In India, for example, native troops were recruited before the war was declared, already with the aim of putting them to fight in China.

The Kowloon incident, in which British ships opened fire on Chinese junks after a series of scuffles between British sailors and Chinese residents, sparked the gunfight.

Despite being outnumbered, the British forces were far superior technologically, and managed to prevail at the end of the war.

At the beginning of this, in 1839, the Chinese authorities prohibited supplying provisions (food and water) to the communities of residents British in China, so the first actions carried out by the British were to rescue and bring supplies to those communities.

The first actions were naval, such as the battle of Chuenpi, and already revealed British superiority, which was conveniently hidden by local Chinese commanders, camouflaged in reports that minimized Chinese casualties and increased British casualties, appealing to great victories for the Empire of the Dragon.

It was then that the British Parliament made a series of demands that were impossible for the Chinese government to meet.

Among these was immunity for the subjects of his majesty, so that if contraband was seized from them, they would not they could not be detained or prosecuted by the Chinese authorities, as well as demanded beneficial conditions in the trade bilateral.

After an impasse, in June 1840 the first British assault flotilla arrived on the Chinese coast, which included both warships and land forces. Their first objective was the strategic port of Dinghai, which they captured after an ineffective Chinese resistance on July 5, 1840.

From that moment on, the war would be nothing more than British troops "crushing" the Chinese, openly taking advantage of their technical superiority.

From Dinghai the British divided their forces in two, always following the coast, one flotilla in each direction. Meanwhile, the Chinese formalized a request to start talks, which began even with the two sides still at odds.

In August 1841, the Portuguese opened the port of Macau to the British, who thus had a new protected base.

Portugal practically owed Great Britain its independence of Spain, and although the country was initially neutral in the conflict, it did not want to hurt its traditional friendship with the British, nor miss possible benefits in the distribution of the cake after the imminent victory of the forces of their graceful majesty.

The script of the attacks was practically always repeated in the same way: when the British fleet arrived, the Chinese junks, which were obliterated by modern British ships, with greater firepower, more range, and greater endurance.

This was followed by the naval bombardment of land targets and finally, with the support of ships, the landing of troops and conquest.

Seeing the war lost, the Chinese authorities resumed peace talks with the British, which led to the Treaty of Nanking, whose main clause was the cession of Hong Kong.

In addition to this clause, commercial advantages were also given to the British, and compensation was provided $6 million in silver from the Chinese government to pay for opium destroyed before the conflict. For their part, the British abandoned some territorial conquests.

However, the power hunger of the colonial powers in China, led by Great Britain, was far from being sated.

This would lead to a new opium war, which would begin in 1856 and last until 1860.

After Great Britain, other powers such as France and the United States also signed their own bilateral treaties with China, that is why in 1855 the British government requested to renegotiate the Treaty of Nanking, proposing humiliating terms for China.

Among these were the legalization of the production, trade and consumption of opium, or the abolition of taxes for foreign merchants.

Given the Chinese refusal, the British took advantage of the so-called "Arrow incident" to issue an ultimatum. In that incident, a ship registered in Hong Kong (British possession) but Chinese-owned, she was boarded by Chinese authorities on suspicion of smuggling, and various Chinese sailors arrested.

After putting down the Indian Rebellion, British troops attacked China in 1857.

The attack took place in the important commercial port of Canton, a city close to the British possession of Hong Kong, and which had been for centuries the only Chinese port open to the foreign trade, and one of the few before the First Opium War.

France joined Great Britain after the Chinese execution of the missionary Auguste Chapdelaine, sending ships.

The United States and Russia were invited by Britain to join the coalition, and although they initially declined, they eventually joined. Russia on paper, although it did not send troops, and the United States with a small force.

On December 15, 1857, the attack on Canton began, which surrendered on January 1 of the following year.

Faced with the Taiping Rebellion, which would end in a long and painful conflict (the number of deaths it caused is estimated at 20 million), the monarchy china could not resist an attack by the western powers, so it rushed to negotiate.

The result of this negotiation was the Treaty of Tianjin, according to which up to eleven new ports were opened to trade with the countries Western ships were free to navigate the Yangtze River, and China's indemnity payments to Britain and France.

After the signing of the agreement, these last two powers offered decisive help to the Qing dynasty to end the Taiping Rebellion.

Fotolia art: Lioneska