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While Europe underwent a period of industrialisation and revolutionary change, China experienced its own upheaval. The Portuguese had arrived in China already in 1517, but the Ming Chinese had had no interest in learning from them, assuming that China and its products were superior in every way. While not treated as equals, foreigners had nevertheless been permitted to operate in Macau, a Chinese port from where they imported tea, silk, porcelain and other goods for which there was growing demand in Europe.
The Manchus were clear from the outset that all trade was to be made on their terms, via their own intermediaries, and that the Europeans should pay for items they wished to purchase with silver. The problem was that the quantity of the purchases made by the British traders and the refusal of the Chinese to part with their own silver to buy foreign goods in any significant quantities began to affect the British balance of trade. Looking for a solution, the British realised that if their traders could exchange merchandise in India for raw materials and then exchange these raw materials with the Chinese in return for tea, they would stem the haemorrhage of silver from their treasury.
One of the products they obtained from India was opium, and to their joy, this found an insatiable demand in China. Used to relieve pain and reduce hunger, it was also used to make morphine and heroin, a drug to which the Chinese soon became addicted. Within no time at all, a huge number of men under 40 living in the country’s coastal regions were smoking opium and by the late 1830s over 30,000 chests of it were being imported annually by various foreign powers. However, most of this was in fact smuggled into the country as the Chinese government had recognised the social cost of the drug and had banned it as a result. In 1838, realising that their ban was being defied, the Qing government decreed the death sentence on anyone dealing in opium. When they realised a year later that this threat was not reducing the trade in opium, government officials confiscated and then burned 20,000 chests of East India Company opium, scattering the ashes into the sea and offering no compensation to the traders.
For the British, the trade in opium and tea provided such significant revenues that they could not take this affront lying down. They responded by sailing into the port of Canton with several warships, easily defeating the Chinese with the aid of their modern weaponry and forcing the Chinese to open their ports to British trade. Furthermore, the Chinese were required to cede the island of Hong Kong and to pay an indemnity for the opium they had destroyed. All this was in addition to accepting the distribution of an addictive drug throughout their land. This did not go un-noticed in Britain, where a newly elected member of parliament, William Gladstone, wondered if there had even been “a war more unjust in its origin, or a war more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace.”
The humiliation of the Opium War shattered China’s false sense of superiority and encouraged the rise of anti-Manchu sentiment that had been simmering beneath the surface since the end of the Ming dynasty in 1644. At the same time, China faced a huge population increase and a number of natural calamities. Added together, this resulted in a large increase in poverty and unrest that ultimately provided the setting for China’s largest uprising and the bloodiest civil war in history.