The Opium Wars were two conflicts fought primarily between Britain and Qing Dynasty China in the middle of the nineteenth century. The First Opium War was fought between 1839 and 1842 and the Second Opium War was fought between 1856 and 1860. The Second French Empire was allied with Britain in the second conflict. Both wars were effectively fought as part of wider efforts by the western powers to force China, Korea and Japan to open their countries to outside influences after two centuries of isolating themselves from foreign interference. They are termed the Opium Wars because much of the conflict focused on British efforts to force the Chinese to open its ports to the import of British opium which it was mass-producing in its colonies in India and which it needed to find a market for the excess amount of. The wars opened up a period of foreign settlement in parts of China and also Chinese migration to other countries, notably the western United States.[1]
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Opium Wars chronology of events
The root of the Opium Wars ultimately lies in a series of events which began in the seventeenth century in different parts of Asia:
Occurence one
First, in the Far East, after the arrival of the first Europeans in China, Japan and Korea in the shape of Jesuit missionaries from Portugal and Spain and Dutch and English merchants in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese all decided to shut their countries to the westerners, leaving just one or two ports open in each country to foreign trade. In Japan this was known as Sakoku meaning ‘closed country’.[2] The idea of this isolation, which would last for two centuries, was to protect their traditional cultures from foreign interference and influences.
Occurence two
Secondly, England began acquiring its first colonies along the coast of India in the 1640s, 1650s and 1660s at places like Chennai and Bombay. In the second half of the eighteenth century the English East India Company conquered much of the subcontinent. With this, the British trade in commodities like tea and opium ballooned, often with Britain having far more of these goods available than was needed for the European market.[3]

These two processes combined to lead to the First Opium War in 1839. Britain was enjoying a period of pronounced imperial expansion at this time. For instance, it had expanded eastwards from India to acquire the colony of Singapore in the late 1810s, while the British colonies in Australia and New Zealand were also emerging in the nineteenth century. In tandem, many countries were beginning to look towards the closed Chinese, Korean and Japanese ports as lucrative areas of mercantile expansion as the first steamships made the Western Pacific much more accessible.
All of these factors led Britain to initiate a war against Qing Dynasty China in 1839, in order to force it to open its country to foreign trade and to begin accepting consignments of British opium from India, which the Chinese had earlier imposed a ban on the importation of.[4]
Opium wars duration
The First Opium War lasted for three years. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops were mobilized, but with its technological abilities and weaponry having accelerated well beyond the Chinese in recent decades, the British Royal Navy, with some three dozen ships and 20,000 or so troops, was able to defeat the Chinese. The island of Hong Kong was seized as a British colony as part of the Treaty of Nanking of 1842.[5]
The war was effectively a form of narco-terrorism led by a state which forced China to open its borders to the influx of huge consignments of opium, the trade of which increased from 350 tons per year in the 1820s to peak at 6,500 tons in the 1880s, creating widespread opium addiction across the country. Efforts by the Qing government to restrict the trade again in the mid-1850s led to the Second Opium War in 1856. After a joint Franco-British expedition which captured Beijing in 1860 a second humiliating peace treaty was imposed on China. New territory near Hong Kong was annexed in the shape of the Kowloon Peninsula on the mainland and Stonecutter’s Island.[6]
The Opium Wars initiated a period of immense political crisis in China. Decades of political turmoil followed, which saw the joint intervention of the European powers in its affairs during the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), followed by the collapse of the Chinese imperial system in 1911 and then the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949). Only with the Chinese economic miracle of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s has the country exited this period of lengthy turmoil and political instability.[7]
Extent of migration caused by the opium wars
There was a large amount of migration caused both directly and tangentially by the Opium Wars. In the direct sense, the British occupation and annexation of Hong Kong in the early 1840s and then adjacent Kowloon Peninsula in 1860, led to British colonization of the island and surrounding area. British administrators, merchants, businesspeople and soldiers and mariners came to live here in substantial numbers. There were thousands of British colonists and army personnel living in the burgeoning city by the time the Opium Wars ended.[8] The Opium Wars also triggered the opening of China to the rest of the world. This led to the development of small communities of European officials and merchants in cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing in the second half of the nineteenth century. More significant still was the outward migration of Chinese people to other countries, above all to the western United States and California in particular.[9]
Demographic impact of the opium wars
First demographic
The most direct demographic impact of the Opium Wars was felt in Hong Kong. As we have seen, thousands of British people settled here in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, in a broader sense, the Opium Wars led to Hong Kong’s emergence as a great mercantile and financial center in southern China. Today this is a great city of just over seven and a half million people.
It's emergence came about as a result of British activity here which began as a result of the First Opium War. It is debatable if there would be a major city of this kind on the island today were it not for the events of the early 1840s and any settlement which would have emerged here would not have the cosmopolitan and internationalist culture which Hong Kong does had it not been for the Opium Wars.[10]
Second demographic
The other major area where the migration associated with the Opium Wars was most keenly felt was in California. With the opening of its country to foreigners in the early 1840s, poor Chinese people began to realize that they could find new opportunities overseas. Many joined the waves of movement to California as part of the Gold Rush there from the late 1840s onwards, later finding work in the cigar industry and laying down much of the railway lines of California. Others, in a sign of the residual impact of the Opium Wars, opened opium dens in America's cities.[11]
Following the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 between the United States and China Chinese migration expanded even further, with thousands of Chinese migrants arriving to cities like San Francisco and San Diego. Such was the extent of the migration that in 1882 the US government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act banning further Chinese migration for ten years. Thus, in a sense the influence of the Opium Wars was still being felt a half a century after they began.[12]
See also
Explore more about the opium wars
- Chinese Genealogy: An Introduction to Jiapu 家譜 (Chinese Genealogy Records) at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Chinese American Research: Challenges and Discoveries at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Finding Genealogical Data in the Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Finding Chinese Railroad Worker Files in the U.S. at Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
- Chinese American Research: Challenges and Discoveries at Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
References
- ↑ https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/first-china-war-1839-1842
- ↑ https://www.britannica.com/topic/sakoku
- ↑ https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/the-british-impact-on-india-1700-1900/
- ↑ https://academic.oup.com/book/1389/chapter-abstract/140716857?redirectedFrom=fulltext
- ↑ https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/first-china-war-1839-1842
- ↑ https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Second-Opium-War/
- ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13017882
- ↑ https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9708/hongkong.html
- ↑ Adam McKeown, 'Chinese emigration in global context, 1850-1940', in Journal of Global History, Vol. 5, No. 1 (March, 2010), pp. 95-124.
- ↑ https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9708/hongkong.html
- ↑ https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/5views/5views3c.htm
- ↑ https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/chinese-exclusion-act