A hand poked an oily-brown ball of opium with a needle - and here it is in the cup of a smoking pipe. A few puffs - and the person is already in another world. There is no poverty, imperative shouts, disappointments, resentments ... Marvelous visions, inspired by dope, pass. You can get away from everyday worries and worries again for a while, but you have to pay for this not only in money, but also in health. An addiction to a poisonous potion makes a person a living corpse.
“There is demand for opium in China,” decided the gentlemen on the board of the British East India Company. - There will be profit.
The city of Guangzhou (Canton) became the center of the opie trade. The main suppliers of the poisonous potion were the British. The Americans also strove to keep up with them.
Opium smoking in China has become rampant. For the Chinese treasury, the addiction of the population turned into exhaustion. The basis of the country's monetary circulation was silver bullion. It sailed abroad in ever-increasing numbers: to both English and American merchants in payment for opium.
“The pernicious addiction of my subjects is intolerable,” the bogdykhan Min-nin decided. In 1839, his representative Lin Zexu arrived in Guangzhou. He was instructed to eradicate the trade of "overseas devils", as foreigners were called in China, and their Chinese companions. Lin Zexu forced the English merchants to surrender their opium and ordered it to be destroyed. In two messages to Queen Victoria of Great Britain, Lin Zexu announced the prohibition of the use of opium in China and demanded that the production of the drug be stopped in England and the lands subordinate to her. If England wants to trade with China, she must put an end to the criminal trade in opium forever.
Relations between the Chinese authorities and the British were further aggravated by the incident on the Kowloon Peninsula (Kowloon). A Chinese man died after a fight with English sailors. The chief inspector of English trade in China, Elliot, refused to extradite the guilty sailors to a Chinese court. Lin Zexu responded by ordering a boycott of British goods and a halt to food supplies to the British.
In September-November 1839 there were battles between English ships and Chinese junks. Bogdykhan banned all British trade in China. Skirmishes did not stop, and both sides prepared for war. Lin Zexu purchased guns from the Americans and the Portuguese. Fireships were prepared - boats or rafts with burning brushwood or other combustible material. In the narrowest places of the Pearl River, wooden piles were driven into the bottom, which were pulled together with chains. Hidden under water, they were supposed to serve as a barrier to English ships. This technique was widely used by the Chinese in the wars of antiquity and the Middle Ages. In January 1840, Queen Victoria, in her speech from the throne at the opening of Parliament, announced the support of the British government for Captain Elliot's actions in China. With the Queen's blessing, Foreign Secretary Palmerston single-handedly decided to go to war against China.
In June 1840, an English military squadron was already plying Chinese waters. The interventionists brutally plundered Dinghai, the main city of the Zhoushan archipelago. On January 29, 1841, the Bogdykhan declared war on England.
Military operations unfolded in the province of Guangdong. The intervention was opposed by the local population. With the arrival of reinforcements, the British are expanding their operations in East China, in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. They captured Shanghai, but on the outskirts of Nanjing they were put up with courageous resistance by the garrison of Zhenjiang. At the end of the siege, his surviving soldiers and officers killed their family members and then committed suicide. General Hai Ling set his house on fire and died in the blaze.
By threatening to bombard Nanking with artillery, the British commander Pottinger intimidated the Chinese command, although it had a large army in the city.
Anglo-Chinese negotiations began in Nanjing. They ended with the signing of a peace treaty on August 29, 1842 aboard the English warship Cornwall. It received the name "Nanjing" and put an end to the first "opium" war of 1840-1842.
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Under the terms of this agreement, China opened five seaports for English trade: Guangzhou, Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai. In these so-called "open ports" the British received the right to unlimited trade, freedom of settlements. China ceded the island of Hong Kong to England. He had to pay the cost of the opium destroyed in 1839, the lost property of the British, military expenses incurred, and pledged to release all English prisoners. Bogdykhan promised to pardon his subjects who helped the enemy. Favorable rates were introduced in ports open to trade. The Treaty of Nanjing completely passed over in silence opium, which was a pretext for war. However, after the end of the war, the import of this drug into China increased. In the year of the conclusion of the Nanjing Treaty, 33,508 boxes were received, in 1843 - 42,699.
In the first armed clash with developed capitalist England, the backward feudal Qing Empire was defeated. The technical and economic backwardness of China had a particularly noticeable effect on the state of armament of the Qing army. The fleet consisted of obsolete wooden ships and boats, while the English squadron had steamers completely unknown in China. The Chinese cannons, bulky and outdated, could only fire with a fixed sight. Chinese soldiers could oppose English mortars, rifles and carbines only with antediluvian matchlock and flintlock guns, bows, spears, sabers and cleavers.
The course of the war, which was unfavorable for the Qing Empire, was largely facilitated by the defeatist moods that were widespread at the court.
Other countries hurried to take advantage of the fruits of the British victory. The United States and France sent their naval forces to the coast of China during the war. After the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, the American and French representatives entered into negotiations with the Chinese authorities, seeking the same rights as the British.
In October 1856, the Chinese authorities in search of opium detained the ship "Arrow" ("Arrow"). The Hong Kong-registered vessel sailed under the British flag. Chinese officials tore down the British flag and several of the crew were taken prisoner as suspected piracy.
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