For more than a thousand years before the birth of Christ, China was one of the most advanced civilizations on Earth. From the ideas of Confucius, China built one of the world’s most sophisticated systems of ethics and government. But China’s greatness led to arrogance. Many inland rulers came to imagine China as the sole center of civilization, the Middle Kingdom, with no need for commerce with the outside world.

The people of China’s coast had a very different vision of the world. Long before the age of Columbus, Chinese explorers sailed all the way to India and Africa. China’s southsea coast was dotted with traders, merchants, and pirates. But by the beginning of the 13th century, the insular vision of the rulers in the heartland dominated China.

These men saw outsiders as barbarians and the sea as a natural barrier to their entry. But there was one coast that China’s rulers could not ignore--it was the inland coast--the sea of grassland called, The Steppe. Firing arrows from a gallop, the troops of Ghengis Khan used massacre as a strategy, leaving fields piled high with bones.

Living ten days in the saddle at a time, the Mongols swept down over the peasant foot soldiers of China, taking Korea and pushing south to Canton and then on to Vietnam. Using Chinese and Korean war junks, the Mongols launched attacks on Java and on Japan. The Japanese were no match for the Mongol archers. But the Mongol fleet was destroyed by a typhoon the Japanese called Kamikaze or Divine Wind.

Led by Ghengis and his sons and grandsons, the Mongols kept pushing the boundaries of their empire. They overran Persia in 1231. By 1241, they had burned Moscow, taken Kiev, invaded Poland and Hungary, and reached the Adriatic Sea. After the conquest, the road became the symbol of Mongol rule. For the first time in history, a direct trade route linked China with Europe and the Middle East, all under the protection of Mongol soldiers.

The fascinating thing about the Mongols is that they were warriors, but they were also traders. To them, the trader had a very special significance. They moved from place to place and so did the merchants that moved with them. They were very friendly to people who came from other places. They didn’t have the insularity of the Chinese or the Europeans, for that matter. They welcomed all races, all creeds, as long as they obeyed.

In 1260, Kubla Khan, Ghengis’s grandson, moved his capitol to Peking and transformed the insular Middle Kingdom into the world’s most cosmopolitan place. Ambassadors from Nazareth and Naples came to pay homage to the Khan. Arab traders came from Baghdad and, with them, the religion of Islam. Buddhist monks from Tibet mingled with Mongol shamans and emissaries from the Pope taught choir boys to sing Gregorian chants for the Great Khan in his new palace in Peking.

Marco Polo came from Italy and spent 16 years in the service of Kubla Khan. (Quote) "The Cathayans are superior to any other people in good manners and wisdom. They devote themselves to learning and to all the scientific disciplines." When he returned to Europe, Marco Polo brought news of the astounding advances of Chinese civilization including gun powder, the compass, paper money, and printing.

The Mongol’s strength as warriors turned out to be their greatest weakness. When one ruler died, the struggle over succession often dissolved into civil war. By the middle of the 14th century, Mongol armies left China to return to The Steppe to fight over an empire that was tearing itself apart. China did not drive out the Mongols, but by 1363 the Mongol rule of China had come to an end.

The Mongols in many ways could be considered to be a cosmopolitan people yet they left a legacy whereby the Ming Dynasty became something of a continental reaction to it. Most of the efforts, especially the Ming Dynasty, simply became arrogant and self-controlled. They were not terribly interested in countries with various people from other lands.

The Ming Dynasty ruled an empire opposed to everything that the Mongols represented. From the lush rice belt of south China, the Ming believed that empires were built from farming not trade. They believed China should be self-sufficient. Their empire was dominated by a vision of Chineseness that was distrustful of the outside world.

After the Mongols, when the Mings looked for danger signs, they looked for clouds of dust from the west or the north. The lived very tightly meshed agricultural civilizations, and they were afraid of these people. They wanted to shut themselves off totally from the northern menace on the frontier. Rather than deal with the nomads, the Ming built walls to close China’s northern frontier. These monuments to fear became known in the West as the "Great Wall of China."

They took millions of man hours and fortunes in silver to build. It was a policy of isolation doomed to fail. The effort nearly bankrupt the nation. By the 1600s, Ming China was weak and divided--vulnerable to another invasion from the north.

This time, it was the Manchus. They swept over Mongolia and down through China all the way to Tibet. China was now a Manchu military empire but the civilization and the government would remain Chinese in nature. The Manchus have inherited basically all of the institutions of Ming China. The Manchus are a foreign race but at the same time they become sinasized. They have inherited the Ming legacy so to speak.

The Manchu emperors lived in the forbidden city, the old Ming Palace in Peking. Here they embrace the vision of China as the center of civilization--the Middle Kingdom. From this throne it must have been hard to imagine that China could need anything from the outside world. It was even harder to imagine that China was about to be brought to its knees once again by barbarians.

They were the seaborn barbarians from Europe and America. Some were in search of adventure, some were looking to save souls. Mostly, they came to China and the Pacific to make money. The arrival of these adventure capitalists caught the Middle Kingdom completely by surprise. By the end of the 18th century, the Manchus felt quite secure in their dominion over China. They had pushed back the invaders of the West, the North. They didn’t worry about people from Tibet. The last thing they thought of was an invasion coming from the sea. After all, the sea was a place where you had pirate raids and petty traders, but that was all. The sea was China’s sea.

But China’s sea was becoming a European lake. Since the 16th century, Europeans had come to the south seas and Spice Islands looking for nutmeg, rubber, and tea. When the Portuguese came, followed by the Dutch and the English, they came a long, long way. They needed much more effective weaponry to defend themselves and, of course, the Portuguese and the others soon discovered that they were militarily much stronger than these local traders, who essentially depended upon trading skills rather than military power. That superiority of military strength made the difference.

Cannons, forged in the industrial revolution, gave Europeans total military superiority. In southeast Asia, the Dutch conquered Indonesia. The French conquered Indochina. Then, they began sending specific resources back home. But the resources of southeast Asia paled in comparison to the riches to be found in China. China’s civilization produced the finest silks in the world. Its porcelain was of such superior quality it came to be called simple "china." It’s tea was irresistible.

For centuries, China had allowed foreign traders access to these goods as a matter of noblesse oblige. To its rulers, China was the master civilization, and all other nations tributary states. This was not the relationship Great Britain had in mind.

In 1793, a British Emissary named Lord McCartney was sent Peking to ask the Emperor Chen Long to treat Great Britain as an equal trading partner. McCartney said he was representing King George, and King George wanted to say hello and pay his respects and start trade. " Well," said the Chen Long Emperor, "if this George fellow wants to kowtow that’s all right, go ahead, but we don’t really need you. You’re rather quaint, and you wear some stuffy clothes. These presents you brought us are not very much, considering what we’re used to. But, it’s perfectly all right if you want to be vassals of China, go ahead, but don’t ask for any favors."

This is the port of Macao, a Portuguese dependency 30 miles from Hong Kong. Four hundred years ago it was the first Chinese concession to western seaborn traders. The Chinese walled off Macao from the rest of the country and let the Portuguese build their own community. By the 19th century, other Europeans and Americans lived here the way they lived back home--dancing quadrilles and hosting elegant tea parties. It must have been a piece of Europe put down on the coast of China for the vacation time of the merchants and their women, if they had any with them (and some did).

The westerners relations with the Chinese were filled with irony. The Chinese saw them as uncultured barbarians. They saw the Chinese as Godless heathens. In the 19th century, China’s rulers in Peking used the traders of Canton to deal with the outside world. The Canton system was a system of limited trade. When the British came in, the Manchus basically devise essentially a containment policy. That is to say that all partners would be contained to one port.

In the early years, Americans and British worked hard, but the Chinese traders made most of the money. China had many things the West wanted--tea, silks, porcelain, fireworks. We didn’t have all that many things that China wanted. For a season or two, we could bring ginseng to them. We wreaked ecological catastrophe in the northwest coast trying to get fur to the quite hot Canton. In time, it was just cash that we had; and while this made us popular, it was really having a horrible affect on our domestic economy.

Finally, the British and Americans found an answer to their trade deficit--opium. In China, it was illegal to grow poppies, the source of opium’s narcotic resin. But the British harvested vast fields of poppies in their colony in India. At the British government factory in Patna, the poppy resin came first to the weighing room, where it was inspected. Next, it was dumped into stone vats where it was dried, stirred, and sometimes cut with sand or brown sugar. Then cake makers, working at a rate of 12 an hour, molded the opium into round cakes the size of cannonballs. With 150 cake makers working, Patna produced 11,000 cakes a day--enough to keep 200,000 Chinese addicts smoking opium for a month.

To compete with the British, Americans established the Turkish opium trade. In clipper ships the set sail from Massachusetts, bought opium in Turkey, and carried their cargo to China. They also acted as middle-men for the British in Canton. "When my ancestor, my great-great grandfather Warren Delano, arrived in 1833, he joined the firm Russell, Sturgis & Co. Many articles of trade, but certainly a significant portion of the trade at Russell-Sturgis, was in opium."

The Perkins, the Peabodys, the Russells, and the Lowes were the first families of 19th century Boston. The money they made in the China trade helped build America--funding the railroads that took America west, endowing universities like Princeton, and paying for much of the research of Alexander Graham Bell. The China trade also established American missionaries in China. Peter Parker founded a hospital in Canton.

Other missionaries, like the German Karl Gutslav took a different approach. Gutslav served as a guide and interpreter on the Scottish opium boats of the Jardine Mathesen Company. "

Gutslav’s employers were James Mathesen, a Scottish financier, and William Jardine, a ship’s surgeon. In an early company bulletin, The Opium Circular, Jardine gushed about the financial promise of the illegal trade.

Jardine, Mathesen, and their fellow traders developed a very clever scheme to smuggle their opium. From Macao, the opium traders would sail up to a deserted island called Lintin (Solitary Nail). At Lintin, protected by gun boats, the opium was transferred to storage ships where it waited, like groceries on a shelf, for customers from Canton to claim it. On decks, choking with balls of opium and silver, Chinese middlemen bought their drugs. They smuggled them back to shore in boats called Fast Crabs or "Scrambling Dragons."

For the foreign merchants, there was almost no risk involved. Sails were pleasantness and remittances were peace. Transactions seemed to partake of the nature of the drug--they imparted a soothing frame of mind and no bad debts.

Whoever was responsible, there was no denying the affects, as Edward Delano discovered years later in an opium den he visited in Singapore.

By 1835, over two million Chinese were addicted to opium. The lower classes took to it because the found it stimulating and kept them at work longer than these undernourished people could have coped with--with the kinds of workloads they had. The opium eased their pain. The upper classes were greatly affected by it, very much like today. It’s the middle class and above-- the people who had the money--the young, bright children of such families were the ones who took to it, and it destroyed the basis of the already rocky class that provided the ruling elite of China.

The emperors court was extremely worried, but what do they do? Some people said, conventionally of course, let’s just punish all the opium smugglers. Others said let’s punish both the smugglers and the opium eaters. A third group said, "Why not legalize opium?" In fact, the solutions they suggested were strikingly similar to the solutions offered to solve the drug problem in the United States a century later.

In this film, produced in 1959, the Communist Government of China told its version of the opium war, "In 1838, more than 40,000 cases of opium were imported to Canton alone. Silver poured out of China, almost bankrupting her. As the number of addicts grew, the people were angered."

The hero of this film is an incorruptible official named Lin. The Manchu Emperor appointed Lin the High Commissioner, a virtual Drug Czar, with the power of the empire to stop the Canton opium trade. In 1839, Commissioner Lin arrived in Canton to survey the forces he would use to stop the opium trade.

The Qing Empire was basically built, like the Mongols, on horse. They simply did not expect that the new groups of barbarians would not come from the continental border, but from the sea. Lin wanted to know more about the foreign devils who were pushing opium. As he surveyed the Canton factories, Lin decided that the British merchants must be outlaws. The British Government couldn’t possibly support men like these.

The British never delivered Lin’s letter to the Queen.

Impatient for results, Commissioner Lin blockaded all foreigners in their Canton factories. Then he forced the Canton traders to turn over their entire opium stock, over 3 million pounds. Not wanting to burn it, lest people inhale the fumes, he ordered it dissolved in river trenches. These are the trenches where Lin dissolved the opium. Standing on these banks, Lin offered a prayer as the opium flowed to the sea, "You wash away all stains and cleanse all impurities should tell the creatures of the water to move away for a time to avoid being contaminated."

"The foreigners do not dare to show any disrespect and indeed I should judge from their attitudes to have the decency to feel heartedly ashamed." Far from ashamed, the outraged opium traders hurried to London to address the British Parliament. They demanded their government either pay for their losses or force the Chinese to do so--even if that meant war. A future Prime Minister responded with contempt:

Great Britain was a tiny island with a small seafaring population--the very antithesis of enormous, self-sufficient China. The life-blood of England’s empire was overseas trade and, by 1839, opium was the world’s most traded commodity--the lynch-pin of the world trading system.

The position was impossible. Trade as the West understood it (the British leading the West), had to be open on their terms. The Chinese, as they understood it, considered trade as peripheral and something which should be controlled, minimized and kept under strict conditions. There was no way you could compromise between the two (positions).

In 1839, the British sent an armada to China to demand satisfaction and reparation: sixteen warships, 4,000 troops, 540 guns, four armed steamers, 3,000 tons of coal, and 16,000 gallons of rum (for the men).

In the Communist version of history, the Opium War was the beginning of the long march to the Communist Revolution. In this version, Chinese peasants inspired by Commissioner Lin rose up and beat back the British. The reality was very different. The steam ship was Britain’s secret weapon. Able to motor up rivers without regard for wind or tide, it put a handful of men in control of China’s waterways.

For the first time in China’s history, seaborn barbarians made their way up the Yangtze River, the junction of the Grand Canal, blocking the inland waterway to Peking. "That was the artery to China; and to cut that vital artery, was to wound China mortally. This was shocking. For the first time, the people in the Celestial Kingdom realized that they were not all that self-sufficient--that these pesky foreigners from overseas had a funny little invention called a steamship that could cause great, great trouble."

In China towns, British guns pounded local forts. Then infantrymen attached Fort Champe. The British troops killed all but a handful of the 700 defenders. The fort remains today, pock-marked with the bullet holes of British muskets. An American, William Henry Lowe, visited the fort the day after the battle: "The fort was all battered to pieces. The inside looked more like a slaughter house than anything else. I saw the skeleton of one poor fellow who had been burned, probably from his powder taking fire. In going around some of the outworks, we saw the place were 300 poor fellows were buried. A sailor had put a pole in the ground over the bodies and put up a board with the following inscription: This is the road that leads to glory."

To end the war, the Chinese agreed to terms. They paid $6 million in silver to cover the opium destroyed in Canton and $12 million for British war expenses. In addition, the British forced China to open Canton, Shanghai, and three other cities to western trade. This led to a bitter irony, the treaty broke the Hong monopoly on trade, freeing Chinese traders to build up the port cities even as it enforced Western privilege.

They all sort of joined together and worked their spheres of influence: the British had the Hangzhou and the French took the southwest and the Germans took Shandong and the Russians the northeast, and the Americans also took advantage. This is what made the Chinese feel that it was a kind of a ganging up against them. It wasn’t just one against one. It was all the West turning it on the Chinese civilization.

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