Opium Wars | World History | Khan Academy

This is a map of East Asia in the 19th century, and you can already see significant imperial control by Western European powers. You have the British East India Company in India. You have the French initially getting a foothold in Southeast Vietnam in this orange area, but eventually, they will take over this entire region that will become one day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. You have the Dutch in Indonesia; you have the Spanish in the Philippines.

But what we're going to focus on in this video is the European, and in particular, the British attempt to open up the Chinese markets to British trade. China at the time was under the control of the Ching dynasty. Well, before this period, Chinese products were in demand in Europe, in particular Chinese porcelain and Chinese silk. Unfortunate for the Europeans, the Chinese did not have a lot of demand for European products, and so you had a balance of trade problem.

These products would be exported from China into Europe, and you would have hard silver currency going to China. The imperial powers, especially the British, were looking for a solution. They eventually found that opium, grown in India, which is a highly addictive drug—it's the core constituent of heroin and morphine—could be addictive to the Chinese people and maybe could help solve this balance of trade problem, allowing silver to flow outside of China.

Well, you could imagine the Chinese government, the Ching dynasty, had no interest in opium coming into China. It was destructive to their society; it was an addictive drug. But in 1839, the British decided to force the issue, and you have what will be known as the First Opium War. This is a picture of the Second Battle of 20. You see the British vessel Nemesis, which is actually owned by a company, the British East India Company, destroying Chinese junk ships.

Because of this show of force and military superiority, they were able to win the First Opium War and extract major concessions from Ching China. The Chinese had to open up five ports to trade with the British. They had to give the island of Hong Kong to the British indefinitely, and the British would keep control of it all the way until the end of the 20th century. The Chinese had to pay for the opium that they destroyed; they had to give reparations to the British to pay for the costs of the war.

Now, to add insult to injury, the British were not satisfied. In 1856, you have the Second Opium War, where they try to extract even more concessions from China, after which opium is legalized. The whole time, opium is flooding into the country and really undermining the social fabric of society. To make matters worse for China, you have a major civil war in this time period—the Taiping Rebellion—which was started by this sect of Christianity that viewed it as their destiny to overthrow the Ching dynasty.

This is one of the most bloody civil wars that any nation has seen in history, with over 20 million people being killed. Historians believe that the Ching concessions to the British and then the French, along with the opium that was undermining Chinese society, was a major contributor to this long and bloody civil war. These opium wars are often cited by Japanese in this time period as a reason for their need to industrialize and become an imperial power, so that they don't get unraveled the same way that Ching China does by the Europeans.

But to appreciate that this was even controversial in Europe, William Gladstone, as we enter into the First Opium War, was a young parliamentarian in Britain. He will eventually be, at the end of the 19th century, a significant British prime minister. But as the opium war was beginning, he gave a famous speech in Parliament:

"It is a matter of certainty that if we stopped the exportation of opium from Bengal and broke up the depot at Linton, and checked the cultivation of it in Malwa and put a more stigma upon it, that we should greatly, if not extinguish, the trade in it. The great principles of justice are involved in this matter," and he's talking to, I believe, the foreign minister, who is an aggressive proponent of the opium wars.

"You will be called upon to show cause for your present intention of making war upon the Chinese. They gave us notice to abandon the contraband trade—the trade in opium. When they found that we would not, they had the right to drive us from their coasts on account of our obstinacy in persisting in this infamous and atrocious traffic." And opium was addictive, and William Gladstone had personal experience with this; his sister became addicted to opium.

He went on to say, "I am not competent to judge how long this war may last, but this I can say, that a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace I do not know, and I have not read of." A few days later, he wrote, "I am in dread of the judgments of God upon England for our national inequity towards China."