Quotes About Opium War

This culture of pressure and rivalry tended to produce two, highly contrasted species of official: the creatively corrupt libertine, and the puritan. And it was the tension between the two that helped produce the Opium War, with all its unfortunate consequences.

At the end of the second Opium War (in which it was joined by France), Britain forced the Chinese to fully legalize both the trade in opium and the shipment of Chinese indentured labourers to the Americas (where they worked as slaves in all but name).

I suggest that the Western impact, at least in nineteenth-century China, was overstated (and misstated) by an earlier generation of American historians. An especially egregious example of this, I argue, was American treatment of the Opium War, the objective importance of which was not nearly so great as we—and an almost unanimous corps of Chinese historians—have imagined.