Napoleon once said: "China is a sleeping lion", in fact, the second half of the sentence is the point!
Presumably everyone must know Napoleon very well, he is a very famous emperor of France, single-handedly created a brilliant and huge Napoleonic Empire, almost let the whole of Europe submit to his iron horse, it can be said that he is the greatest military scientist in Europe in the 19th century. But life was by no means smooth sailing, and Napoleon himself could not have predicted that failure would come to him.
After his first defeat in 1814, he was exiled to a small island. The following year he decided to make a comeback, but he did not expect to encounter "Waterloo" again, and the Napoleonic Empire had long since fallen apart. It was one of the most famous French emperors who once said of China: China is a sleeping lion. But many people may not understand, in fact, there is a sentence behind it that is the essence, so that the Chinese people ponder!
Under Napoleon, france occupied almost half of Europe at the time, and he turned the French Republic into the French Empire. How terrifying was the Napoleonic Empire? In the whole of Europe at that time, except for Britain, other European countries either submitted to him or allied with him, and the countries we now call Italy, Switzerland and other countries once belonged to his jurisdiction. In the far east, the emperors of his contemporaries were Qianlong and the Jiaqing Emperor.
Then, during the Jiaqing period, the British sent Amistad to China and continued to talk about the hope that they could trade with China, but they were refused. At this time, Amistad hoped to conquer China by force, just like India, and then planned to return to China, and then asked the king to send troops. At this time, the French Emperor Napoleon also went to the bleakest time of his life, and was defeated by the European anti-French coalition forces many times, and Napoleon himself was escorted by the British army to an island in the Atlantic Ocean and imprisoned. In the third year of Napoleon's imprisonment, Amistad was planning to return to China after being rejected by China, and he heard that the famous Napoleon was on the road he was just about to pass, so he wanted to ask Napoleon's opinion on this matter in China.
At that time, China was in a long-term leading position in the world, so at that time China still considered itself to be the most powerful country in the world. But what China did not expect at that time was that in just a short hundred years, the Western countries completed the mechanical revolution and everything entered the era of large-scale machine production. However, in order to maintain its own dominance, China closed the country to prohibit the advanced ideas of the West at that time, and advanced science and technology were introduced to China. Therefore, at that time, a closed state system was implemented, and Chinese merchants were not allowed to go to sea, and cross-border trade was often not allowed.
Napoleon told Amistad that "China is a sleeping lion, and once awakened, the world will be greatly shaken." But that's just the first part, and the essence of the second half is "Thank God!" Let him sleep forever. At that time, the Qing Dynasty's closed-door policy completely blocked communication with the world, so Napoleon hoped that the Qing Dynasty would continue like this and not "wake up", in fact, this is also his mockery of the backwardness and self-sufficiency of the Qing Dynasty. But I have to admit that Napoleon's wish has failed, and the lion of China has awakened!