An excerpt from the book 'What On Earth Happened?', by Christopher Lloyd:
Tea, silk and porcelain were highly sought-after commodities in Europe. But there was a problem. Chinese society was built on a philosophy of self-sufficiency. Since the mid-fifteenth century, China had been a civilization independent of overseas fleets and trade with far-flung vassal colonies. Food and luxury goods were all manufactured in the home market. The Chinese Emperor himself explained as much in a letter he wrote to King George III of England in 1793, in response to a British request for trade:
‘You, O King, live far away across the mighty seas… The difference between our customs and moral laws and your own is so profound that our customs and traditions could never grow in your soil… I have no use for your country’s goods. Hence there is no need to bring in the wares of foreign barbarians to exchange for our own products…’
Such self-satisfied sufficiency provoked the most extreme imperialistic reaction. If the Chinese didn’t want Western goods, then something had to be done to make them want them.
Officials in Britain’s Honourable East India Company came up with the rather less honourable solution of drug trafficking. An elaborate system was established whereby British traders would buy Chinese tea at Canton and issue credit notes to Chinese traders, who could then redeem them against opium struggled across the border by Bengalese agents from Calcutta. Between 1750 and 1860 thousands of tonnes of opium grown in the poppy fields of Bengal were smuggled into China in exchange for silk, tea and porcelain. The trade was a masterstroke of ingenuity. Rather than the British paying for goods in valuable silver, locally grown opium could be used as currency instead. And the problem of China’s self-sufficiency was solved by a freshly cultivated dependency on highly addictive drugs.
‘You, O King, live far away across the mighty seas… The difference between our customs and moral laws and your own is so profound that our customs and traditions could never grow in your soil… I have no use for your country’s goods. Hence there is no need to bring in the wares of foreign barbarians to exchange for our own products…’
Such self-satisfied sufficiency provoked the most extreme imperialistic reaction. If the Chinese didn’t want Western goods, then something had to be done to make them want them.
Officials in Britain’s Honourable East India Company came up with the rather less honourable solution of drug trafficking. An elaborate system was established whereby British traders would buy Chinese tea at Canton and issue credit notes to Chinese traders, who could then redeem them against opium struggled across the border by Bengalese agents from Calcutta. Between 1750 and 1860 thousands of tonnes of opium grown in the poppy fields of Bengal were smuggled into China in exchange for silk, tea and porcelain. The trade was a masterstroke of ingenuity. Rather than the British paying for goods in valuable silver, locally grown opium could be used as currency instead. And the problem of China’s self-sufficiency was solved by a freshly cultivated dependency on highly addictive drugs.
