The 18th century saw international trade with China blossom, but there was one problem: Western countries had little that pre-industrial China wanted. This trade imbalance frustrated British merchants, who needed to supply an increasing demand for a new drink – tea, which was rapidly becoming popular. They found their answer in the poppy fields of colonial India.

Opium-smoking had been banned by the imperial Chinese government in 1729, but British traders bribed the local officials, who turned a blind eye to their activities, and started shipping large quantities of the drug from British India to the southern Chinese port. Their intention was to create a nation of addicts and thus, an endless market.

2,330 chests of opium were imported in 1788, but that number had risen to 17,257 by 1830. Opium dens spread throughout the country. Officials, often addicts themselves, found it impossible to refuse the sweeteners offered by the now-wealthy British companies.

In 1839, the Qing government appointed Lin Zexu as Imperial Commissioner at Guangzhou. Stubbornly resistant to bribery, in two months he had shut down the trade and destroyed more than 20,000 chests of the drug. He also wrote a moral appeal to Queen Victoria, pointing out that while her government had made opium illegal in Britain, it continued to export it to other countries.

When Chinese junks turned back English merchant vessels in November 1839, China received its answer. The Royal Navy was dispatched and sailed along the coast attacking forts and landing troops who would win victories over the technologically-inferior Chinese. It was a complete disaster for the Qing government, and they were forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing) in 1842.

Five ports were to be opened to British trade, a huge indemnity paid and Hong Kong was to be ceded to Her Majesty’s Empire. This would not be enough to satisfy, however, and in 1856 the British would join with the French to wage a second Opium War. After occupying Beijing and seeing the imperial court flee to northeast China, the European powers secured the legalization of opium, as well as a provision that allowed the free passage of Christian missionaries throughout the whole country.

Ultimately these conflicts finally convinced China that it needed to modernize if it was to hold its own against Western nations. Within the Qing dynasty, a protracted power struggle between reformers and the ultra-conservatives would lead the ultimate demise of the dynasty.

In 1997 Hong Kong was returned to China, thus finally ending an ignominious era of British imperialism in China that began more than 160 years ago over opium.