Opium Wars - Imperialism in China

The opium wars is also known as the Anglo-Chinese Wars, were the climax of trade disputes and diplomatic difficulties between China under Qing Dynasty and the British Empire after China sought to restrict British opium traffickers.

The opium wars were starting like this, during the time 1839, the British wanted to trade with the Chinese, and they went to talk to them, but then, the Chinese didn't felt like to trade with any other country, so they rejected the British. But they didn't felt so upset, and they give the chinese the opium for free. And so now the chinese are controling by those opium, so now they have to trade with the British. And so during that time, all the Chinese started to smoke, cause With nearly 2 million pounds of opium being sold in China each year, opium weakened a large amount of the Chinese population. 10 percent of the Chinese were smoking opium. This also affected China economically, due to the large amount of resources, especially silver, flowing out of the country to pay for the opium.

When the Chinese government discover that the British were selling opium in china, so they were thinking that this is really not good, so the Emperor Daoguang appointed Lin Tse-Hsua, an imperial commissioner, to lead an anti-opium campaign. So he wrote a letter to the Queen of England, but the letter didn't deliver to the Queen's hand, it went to the government of the British. And so they got so mad, by the letter. So then, in the year 1840, the war had began. And during the war, the chinese are not strong enought to fight the Englands, so then they lose.