A Chinese painting on copper of the foreign trading factories at Canton burning
Burning of the "Factories" in Canton, 19th century
Marked Canton (Guangzhou)

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The Opium Wars

Britain made huge profits selling Indian opium in China. When China tried to stop the trade, Britain went to war, and forced China to open ports and hand over Hong Kong. A second war in 1856 to 1860 ended with the burning of the Old Summer Palace.

Place
Canton (Guangzhou) · Humen · Hong Kong · BeijingAsia, Europe
Laid out as
A warTwo sides, a front line, and the turns the fighting took.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

Britain, joined by France in the second war

  1. ITea for opium
  2. IILin Zexu destroys the opium
  3. IIIGunboats
  4. IVThe Treaty of Nanjing and Hong Kong
  5. VThe second war
  6. VIThe Old Summer Palace

The Qing empire

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Lin Zexu
  • Daoguang Emperor
  • Charles Elliot
  • William Jardine

Objects

  • Lin Zexu’s letter to Queen Victoria
  • Opium pipes

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1839 to 1860. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?