Opium Wars is a term referring to two wars that Britain fought against imperial China in the middle of the nineteenth century, presumably over the attempts of the Chinese authorities to stop the growing influx of foreign- produced opium. The real cause of the first Opium War (1839-1842), also called the "Anglo-Chinese War," was Chinese resistance to Britain’s free-trade demands and practices, of which the unrestricted trade in opium was only the most controversial example. Seeking to end high Chinese import duties and other restrictions on foreign trading, the British found a pretext for war when China prohibited the importation of the drug and then confiscated a British shipment of opium.
Opium had long been used in China to treat some ailments, but in the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth centuries millions of Chinese from all social classes began to use it recreationally. Britain’s East India Company was shipping large quantities of Indian-grown opium to China, which it traded for Chinese tea and other local products. The imperial government was so concerned at the growing number of Chinese opium addicts that in 1799 it forbade its import trade and even decreed the death penalty for illicit trafficking in opium. Despite this legal prohibition, the opium trade continued to thrive, as private traders from Britain and other Western countries, including the United States, made huge profits from selling the extract to Chinese "opium eaters." By the late 1830s foreign merchants were importing into China an estimated 5 million pounds of the illegal drug annually. Opium smuggling had so upset China’s balance of trade that its backward economy seemed to be on the verge of collapse. The alarmed imperial authorities made opium possession illegal in 1836 and began to close down the numerous opium parlors.
In 1839 Chinese customs officials seized a shipment of opium that British merchants were planning to market in the seaport city of Canton. In response, Britain rejected the legitimacy of China’s opium ban and threatened to use military force if the confiscated opium was not returned to its British owners. When China refused, the British navy shelled Canton and occupied the coastal areas around it, including Hong Kong. The war continued until China was forced to accept the humiliating terms of the 1842 Treaty of Nanking and compensate British merchants for their lost opium. The opium trade continued and even expanded under the generous import-license privileges that the Treaty of Nanking had granted to British merchants. This first of the so-called "unequal treaties" with China also ceded Hong Kong to Britain, opened five coastal cities, including Canton, to British rights of residence and trade, and imposed a very low tariff on British imports under the "most-favored-nation" principle. In 1844 the French and the Americans pressured China into granting them the same trading rights as the British.
The second Opium War (1856-1860) is sometimes called the "Arrow War" because the British, incensed by what they felt were clear treaty violations, used as a pretext to renew hostilities the boarding and seizure of the British ship Arrow and the arrest of its twelve crew members for opium smuggling and piracy. This time France joined the British in launching a punitive expedition inland after an initial British attack had been repelled by the Chinese. A combined Anglo-French military raid into China’s hinterland led to the signing of the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin. The Chinese imperial court refused to accept the onerous terms of this second "unequal treaty" until another joint Anglo-French expedition captured the capital Peking in 1860 and forced China’s total surrender. The Treaty of Tientsin allowed foreign embassies in Peking, a closed city at that time, opened eleven more coastal cities to foreign trading, and completely legitimized the opium trade. It also allowed westerners to travel in the Chinese interior, gave Christian missionaries the right to proselytize and hold property throughout China, and lowered even further import duties on British goods. In 1860 similarly imposed treaties were signed with France, the United States, and Russia.
The Opium Wars marked the beginning of China’s century-long subjugation and servitude to foreign powers. The defeated Chinese were forced to legalize the importation of opium, accept unfair and unbalanced terms of foreign trade, open up China’s seaports and the Yangtze River to foreign commercial penetration under the so-called "treaty port" system, and exempt westerners from China’s local laws and national jurisdiction. So severely curtailed was China’s independence in that period that the Chinese still view the Opium Wars as a national disgrace.
