The two Opium Wars of 1840-1842 and 1856-1860 are very familiar to all the officials, and I will not repeat them here, but we need to talk about the problems that are not thoroughly explained in general history textbooks.
Opium war
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the bourgeois industrial revolution in Britain had entered a stage of rapid development, and the use of large machines had become more common, so it had a similar problem as many industries today - overcapacity, and by around 1825, this situation had become more serious. We know that the three basic elements of capitalist development are: capital, labor, and the market. During this period, it became a top priority for Britain to find a market for these overproduced products; there was another aspect of the problem that also made Britain helpless, that is, the huge trade surplus between China and Britain, which China sold to Britain tea, raw silk, porcelain, silk and medicinal herbs and the British tried to sell wool to China (sorry no, the rich people in the Heavenly Dynasty wore silk, and the poor wore linen; between 1786 and 1829, Britain came to China 8 times to sell cotton textiles and failed), Metal products (mainly tableware, this is even more ridiculous, their plates and bowls are porcelain is not worse than you British rich people use, they eat chopsticks, knives and forks are what? None of them sold. Chinese only silver was needed, so at that time, the merchant ships from England at the only port of Guangzhou were often pulled a whole ship of silver. And at that time, the Qing court only opened one port in Guangzhou, and the thirteen lines authorized by the government monopolized the import and export business, and our thirteen lines often owed money to foreign merchants, and a considerable part of the reparations after the Opium War were paid for trade arrears. Therefore, at that time, Britain faced two major problems (domestic overcapacity / huge surplus of Sino-British trade) basically could not be solved through the existing form of trade, even if it was possible to plunder silver from the colonies to pay for Goods to China, it was a very troublesome thing, and the silver mine could not be inexhaustible, and it was difficult to sustain it.
Macartney visited China
An important historical event of the Qianlong period is deeply related to the outbreak of the Opium War, that is, the visit of the British Macartney Mission in 1793. It can be said that this was a completely failed diplomatic event that was not pleasant to both sides, first of all, the two sides argued about what kind of courtesy the delegation should perform to the Qianlong Emperor, which showed that there was no protocol at that time, and finally the British met the Qianlong Emperor on one leg. Looking back today, the British mission actually planned to establish formal trade relations with the Great Qing Dynasty (before establishing diplomatic relations), so it brought a lot of goods produced in Britain at that time, and the Emperor of the Great Qing Dynasty would be wrong, treating the British as foreign barbarians who came to worship (at that time, in the eyes of the Great Qing Dynasty, except for China, they were barbarians), which meant that I wanted something in the heavenly kingdom (of course, not so), these things are all strange tricks, We're tired of playing here, so let's go down and get the rewards back. As a result, Britain's desire to exchange goods between the two countries through normal trade was dashed.
Let's look at the British colony of India in South Asia at that time, of course, britain also wanted to sell its own goods in India, or textiles (the important industry of the early British industrial revolution was the textile industry, the steam engine drove the textile machine, and "sheep eating people" also refers to the serious situation of encroaching on land for raising sheep because the textile industry needs a lot of wool). Viewers who have seen Gandhi, starring Ben Kingsley, should remember that there are plenty of scenes in the film where Gandhi leads the Indian people to weave their own cloth, in order to boycott British textiles. India was not as rich as the Qing Dynasty at that time, and the size of the country was much smaller, so how did the poor Indian people become overseas markets with spending power? At such a very critical historical moment, poppy stepped onto the stage of history.
poppy
When the British colonists discovered that India's climate and soil were suitable for growing opium, they almost immediately solved all the problems faced in the Far East: let the Indians grow opium (only allowed to plant and not to smoke), pay indians, ensure their enthusiasm for labor, let them buy British textiles, and then sell opium to China, in exchange for precious silver, there is no need to go to thousands of mountains and rivers to get silver to buy the Chinese goods they need, and the huge deficit is thus solved, although the opium trade is shameful. But the man who came up with this one-stroke approach is an absolute genius. The subsequent historical facts are well understood by everyone, and I will not repeat them here.
Finally, let's talk about the other two effects of the Opium War (not the economic reasons behind it), one is internal and economically related, and the other is external, related to the surrounding international relations.
First of all, due to the emergence of the opium trade, the Qing Dynasty soon changed from a surplus country to a deficit country, and a large amount of silver flowed out. To add a background here, the Qing Dynasty at that time adopted a dual-currency circulation system, that is, "silver" and "money". "Silver" is silver, which can only be accessed by the rich and noble in the country, and it is also used as a settlement currency in international trade, equivalent to today's US dollars; and "money" refers to the production of money (copper coins with round square holes). There is an exchange rate between "silver" and "money", when a large amount of silver flows out, it creates a situation of "silver is expensive and cheap", farmers and craftsmen sell their own grain and commodities in exchange for "money", and when paying taxes to the government, they need to be exchanged for silver, the price of silver is high, which invisibly greatly increases the burden of the people and deeply hurts the body of the dynasty. Opium in reality made the people of the Qing Dynasty lost in the green smoke, and the financial crisis caused by the deformed trade finally crushed the entire dynasty.
Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War
Another effect can be arguably more lethal. In 1853, between the two Opium Wars, the American guns blasted away the backward Japan (it was really backward, far worse than the Great Qing, but Japan unswervingly left Asia and entered Europe after being opened to learn from the Western countries), but Japan was really small, poor and resourceless, and the great powers did not even have the mood to invade Japan, and just after signing a bunch of unequal treaties, they threw Japan aside, so That Japan really became an audience. Then he saw the weakness of the Qing Dynasty in front of the great powers, so the ambition to destroy China was planted in the hearts of the Japanese generation at that time, until the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War in 1894, which brought deep war disasters to the Chinese people in the next nearly 50 years.