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Opium In China

1062 Words5 Pages

The historical backdrop of opium in China started with the utilization of opium for therapeutic purposes amid the seventh century. In the seventeenth century, the act of blending opium with tobacco for smoking spread from Southeast Asia, making a far more prominent request. The role of opium as a commodity in Chinese society during the 1700s will be discussed. The paper explores the roles played by China and the British in the opium wars and the impact the wars had on the relations between Western Europe and China. The essay concludes by (opium regimes) Chinese history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would have been distantly diverse without opium. Opium pushed the states of East Asia, and the imperial Qing state most of all, in to …show more content…

In 1750, Britain, the world’s financially most created nation at the time, had a per capita GDP of almost $1,200 (in today’s dollars). Sometime recently the to begin with Opium War (1839-1842), too known as the Anglo-Chinese War, the Qing royal government permitted outside trade — counting the apparently illegal opium imports—only at the seaport of Guangzhou (Canton) and limited contact between going to Westerners and the local Chinese. Royal authorities dreaded that the presentation of Western realism and commercialism, as well as the nearness of crusading Christian ministers from the West, would disturbed the conventional Chinese way of life and weaken the ancient Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist standards, values and customs.1 The Qing tradition, which had ruled since 1644, lived beneath the self-delusion that semi-feudal China could stay until the end of time in amazing separation from the rest of the world, counting from an industrialized West which was clearly exceeding …show more content…

Nowadays, the never-forgotten injury of the Opium Wars proceeds to be, in Chinese eyes, a limit and humiliating update of their past overcome and colonial subjugation, as well as of the West’s self-righteous false reverence and hubris.11 Occasionally, the Communist government in Beijing has indeed utilized the memory of the Opium Wars in attempting to avoid legitimized Western feedback of China’s destitute human-rights record and its iron-fist run the show of

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