The Opium Wars

Britain had a problem: it craved Chinese tea, and China wanted almost nothing Britain made, so silver drained east. British merchants solved it by selling Indian opium into China — illegally, and on a scale that created millions of addicts. When the Qing commissioner Lin Zexu seized and destroyed 20,000 chests of the drug at Guangzhou in 1839, Britain went to war to keep the trade open. Steam gunboats and modern artillery settled it quickly against a Qing military still equipped for another era. The Treaty of Nanking handed Britain Hong Kong, opened five ports to foreign trade, imposed an indemnity, and granted British subjects immunity from Chinese law; a second war in 1856–60 ended with the burning of the emperor's Summer Palace. It began what Chinese historians call the century of humiliation — a technological gap converting directly into political submission.