If you have seen the movie "The King of War", you will deeply feel how dark and terrible the world of arms dealers is. The huge amount of money earned by arms dealers is stained with the blood and tears of the people in the war zone who have been mutilated by weapons. Jardine Matheson was the king of China's wars in the late Qing Dynasty and early Ming Dynasty.
After the Opium War, foreign firms led by British capital entered China one after another, relying on capital and power to control various economic activities.
In the several wars experienced by the Qing government in the late period, the arms and other materials needed were basically handled by foreign companies. While relying on China to make a windfall, foreign firms have brought deep suffering to Chinese people. The famous Opium War was, in part, waged by Jardine Matheson and the British government. It can be said that these foreign firms opened up the modernization of China.
In 1832, two scottish merchants from Scotland, William Jardine and James Madison, founded the Jardine Firm in Canton, which had been engaged in the criminal drug trade from the beginning. Jardine & Co. engaged in very simple trade, importing opium at a low price from the East India Company, selling it to China at a high price, and then buying tea from China at a low price on the way back, selling it to Britain at a high price, and going back and forth.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, foreigners had always been one of the people at the top of the Qing government who did not want to have conflict, so under the coercion and inducement of Jardine Foreign Firm, many officials of the Qing Government were bribed, and all the way to the green light, Jardine Foreign Firm became one of the most important opium suppliers at that time.
After the Daoguang Emperor ordered a ban on smoking, Jardine Foreign Firm became the focus of Lin Zexu's anti-smoking campaign. Under Lin Zexu's investigation, 20,000 boxes of opium were destroyed, and the Jardine Foreign Company alone accounted for more than 7,000 boxes. These losses greatly annoyed the shareholders of Jardine Bank, so shortly after Lin Zexu banned smoking, Jardine Foreign Firm instigated parliamentarians in Britain to launch a war of aggression against China and punish China's anti-smoking behavior.
At first, British lawmakers were dismissive of jargon's agitation because they didn't want to be manipulated by a group of opium dealers. Jardine Did Not Give Up, Bribing British Parliamentarians with Money while creating public opinion in Britain that China threatened British interests. Not only that, Jardine Foreign Firm also single-handedly planned the marching route, logistical support, and targets of the invasion of China, and put the benefits of invading China in front of the British parliamentarians, and finally, britain launched the Opium War through the proposal.
During the Opium War, the Jardine Foreign Company all went out and paid for the british army to fight. The captain of the trading ship of jardine was pulled to the British warship as a navigator, and other employees acted as interpreters for the British army. Jardine himself also contributed his years of income to the British army as a fund, contracting the British army's food expenses.
In the Opium War, the foreign army of only more than 10,000 people defeated a heavenly kingdom with a population of 40,000 people without the ability to fight back, and the Qing government was forced to sign the Treaty of Nanking with Britain, and China was reduced to a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. Afterwards, Jardine Foreign Firm also achieved its own goal and received a huge amount of compensation.
With this capital, Jardine & Co. became the first foreign firm to enter Hong Kong. After Jardine & Co. moved to Hong Kong, in order to better connect with China's local atmosphere, Jardine & Co. officially changed its name to "Jardine & Co.", which means happy and peaceful. From this time on, this foreign firm, which symbolized joy and peace, officially began to deprive and squeeze China's economy for more than a hundred years.
With the legalization of opium, Jardine Matheson & Co. made a windfall in China from opium. In 1864 alone, jardine matheson's opium trade was close to eight million taels of silver, and behind the opium worth eight million taels of silver, it is unknown how many Chinese families were destroyed and accounted for one-tenth of the tax revenue of the late Qing Dynasty.
After 1872, with the decline in profits from the opium trade, Jardine Matheson & Co. also gradually transformed and diversified its investments, involving infrastructure projects, banking, shipping, arms and other industries. At the end of the 19th century, Jardine Matheson & Co. invested in the construction of a large number of railways in China, the first railway in China was invested by Jardine Matheson & Co. Co., Ltd., including the Shanghai-Nanjing Railway, which was the most popular in the late Qing Dynasty and early Ming Dynasty.
Since the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, Jardine Matheson & Co. has had a very close relationship with the upper echelons of the Qing Dynasty. Jardine Matheson & Co. has always had a deep connection with magnates like Li Hongzhang. Under the instruction of this group of magnates, Hu Xueyan and Sheng Xuanhuai, two red-top businessmen, had a very close business relationship with Jardine Matheson & Co.
Jardine Matheson & Co. loaned to the Qing government during Zuo Zongtang's reconquest of Xinjiang and the Sino-French War, and Jardine matheson not only received high interest on huge loans, but also took the opportunity to enter other industries Chinese mainland, which made Jardine Matheson profitable and made Jardine&W more and more close to the upper echelons of the Qing government.
What was the most profitable thing in the war years? Of course, it is to engage in arms, and the United States has made its fortune from war by selling arms. Jardine Matheson & Co. began to participate in the arms trade after the Second Opium War. Due to its ambiguous relationship with Qing government officials, Jardine Matheson & Co. easily took over a large number of military purchase orders. In these orders, Jardine Matheson & Co. imported a large number of outdated foreign weapons and then sold them to the Qing government at a high price of new weapons, which made a profit of millions of taels of silver.
Even after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, Jardine Matheson was one of the largest arms dealers in China, and warlords such as Zhang Zuolin and Wu Peifu, the king of the Northeast, were all major customers of Jardine Matheson & Co. Jardine Matheson's arms trade directly affected the military strength of various warlords in the country, and Jardine Matheson became the real king of war in China at that time.
After the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japan, Jardine Matheson & Co. was also affected, and its business in Chinese mainland shrank sharply. After 1949, Jardine Matheson & Co.,Ltd.'s properties in the mainland were basically state-owned, and in 1954, Jardine Matheson & Co. completely withdrew from the mainland, relocated its headquarters to Hong Kong, and then successively shifted its focus to Southeast Asia and the United Kingdom.
Today, Jardine Matheson Group is one of the world's top 500 companies, ranked 301st, and still has business in Hong Kong, with more than 100,000 employees. Although the headquarters of jardine group operations is no longer in Hong Kong, most of its business is still in Hong Kong, and the name Jardine Matheson still has a huge influence in Hong Kong, which is a microcosm of China's semi-feudal and semi-colonial era.