Warriors Cat College

Chapter 3

Two days later....

After school, I arrived back at my dorm and Bluefur was gone. Probably hanging out with her boyfriend. I rolled my eyes at her mentally and sat down at my desk, opening my dragon-cover notebook and flipped to the page of my Social Studies assignment, which was due in two days.

Assignment:

Write an essay summarizing how the Opium War started. Your essay must be at least seven paragraphs long, and should have enough detail to be able to be put in the beginning of a book. Your work is due on Wednesday, August 24th during our lessons.

"Opium war...Opium War.." I muttered, flipping through the pages of my book, which was hand-written by my personal librarian, "Aha!"

(Author's note: I copied all of this from Wikipedia. But let's say my lovely librarian hand-wrote all of this.)

The Opium Wars (simplified Chinese: 鸦片战争; traditional Chinese: 鴉片戰爭) were two wars waged between the Qing dynasty and Western powers in the mid-19th century. The First Opium War, fought in 1839–1842 between Qing China and the United Kingdom, was a conflict triggered by the dynasty's campaign to enforce its prohibition of opium against British and American merchants who sold opium produced in India and Turkey. The Second Opium War was fought between the Qing and the United Kingdom and France, 1856–1860. In each war, the European force's modern military technology led to easy victory over the Qing forces, with the consequence that the Qing government was compelled to grant favourable tariffs, trade concessions, reparations and territory to the Europeans.
The wars and the subsequently-imposed treaties weakened the Qing imperial government and forced China to open specified treaty ports (especially Shanghai) that handled all trade with imperial powers. In addition, China gave the sovereignty over Hong Kong to the United Kingdom.
Around this time, China's economy also contracted slightly, but the Taiping Rebellion (1849–1864) and later Dungan Revolt had a much larger effect.

I paused there and took a piece of paper and a pen from my backpack, and started to write a summary of the first page.

The Anglo-Chinese War, also known as the Opium War or the First Opium War, was a series of military engagements fought between Britain and the Qing dynasty between 1839 and 1842. The immediate issue was the Chinese seizure of private opium stocks at Canton to stop the banned opium trade, and threatening the death penalty for future offenders. The British government insisted on the principles of free trade and equal diplomatic recognition among nations, and backed the merchants' demands. The British navy defeated the Chinese using technologically superior ships and weapons, and the British then imposed a treaty that granted territory to Britain and opened trade with China. Twentieth century nationalists considered 1839 the start of a century of humiliation, and many historians considered it the beginning of modern Chinese history.

In the 18th century, the demand for Chinese luxury goods (particularly silk, porcelain, and tea) created a trade imbalance between China and Britain. European silver flowed into China through the Canton System, which confined incoming foreign trade to the southern port city of Canton. To counter this imbalance, the British East India Company began to grow opium in Bengal and allowed private British merchants to sell opium to Chinese smugglers for illegal sale in China. The influx of narcotics reversed the Chinese trade surplus, drained the economy of silver, and increased the numbers of opium addicts inside the country, outcomes that seriously worried Chinese officials.

In 1839, the Daoguang Emperor, rejecting proposals to legalise and tax opium, appointed Viceroy Lin Zexu to go to Canton to halt the opium trade completely. Lin wrote an open letter to Queen Victoria, which she never saw, appealing to her moral responsibility to stop the opium trade. Lin then resorted to using force in the western merchants' enclave. He arrived in Guangzhou at the end of January and organized a coastal defense. In March, British opium dealers were forced to hand over 2.37 million pounds of opium. On 3 June, Lin ordered the opium to be destroyed in public on Humen Beach to show the Government's determination to ban smoking.