The Origins of the Opium Wars
The Origins of the Opium Wars
The Meeting of Two Empires at the Pre-Dawn of a New Age
The year is 1793. Sponsored by King George III and “under the command of Captain Sir Erasmus Gower, the HMS Lion escorted the East Indiaman Hindostan, which carried the British ambassador Lord Macartney on his way to visit the Qianlong Emperor of China (the Macartney embassy).”
For hundreds of years, Europeans had revered China as one of the great civilizations of the world — more civilized, more powerful, and more admirable than any other on Earth. Commerce between China and Europe had largely been land-based via the Silk Roads for thousands of years, but by the late 18th century, the Chinese Emperor Qianlong had opened oceanic trade to foreigners via a single port at Canton.
Ascendant in the West, the British desired more favorable commercial treatment from the Chinese, wishing for more access to trade throughout China’s interior and more direct diplomatic relations between Beijing and London.
As France moves toward Revolution on the European continent, The Macartney embassy sets sail from London, sailing south to the island of Madeira off the coast of Portugal, and then to the Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco, and then southwest across the Atlantic to Rio De Janeiro. From there, the HMS Lion catches the prevailing winds and sails back across the south Atlantic rounding the Cape of Good Hope and then into the abyss of the Southern Indian Ocean. Two thousand miles from any continent, they stop briefly at Amsterdam Island, where they find 5 men (French and American) posted on the obscure island to skin seals for the french fur trade. And then they head north through modern Indonesia, then on to Canton, and then on to Beijing. At Beijing, the party must travel inland over mountain passes to meet the emperor at his summer palace.
The discussions that ensue, though seemingly obscure at first glance, represent an important moment in which the two greatest powers on Earth at the time meet and set in motion a chain of events that will lead to the Opium Wars, great moral atrocities of the British Empire, and China’s lost century.