41–50 of 92 posts
>We find your country is sixty or seventy thousand li [three li make one mile, ordinarily] from China Yet there are barbarian ships that strive to come here for trade for the purpose of making a great profit. The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians. That is to say, the great profit made by barbarians is all taken from the rightful share of China. By what right do they then in return use the poisonous dru…
>We find your country is sixty or seventy thousand li [three li make one mile, ordinarily] from China Yet there are barbarian ships that strive to come here for trade for the purpose of making a great profit. The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians. That is to say, the great profit made by barbarians is all taken from the rightful share of China. By what right do they then in return use the poisonous dru…
Unfortunately the people he wrote that letter to didnt see them as equals. Did that letter suggest the British were seen as equals? The phrase "barbarian" is used 16 times in the text... --- "The kings of your honorable country by a tradition handed down from generation to generation have always been noted for their politeness and submissiveness." "Privately we are delighted with the way in which the honorable rulers…
One thing to keep in mind is that the Ching government had already launched an opium war before the British began their narcopolitics. This is from P.E Caquet's "Opium's Orphans" “n the leafy town of Taiyu, Shanxi, an inland Chinese province southwest of Beijing, the district magistrate Chen Lihe had a stele put up for public display. The date was 1817 and, four years earlier, the emperor had issued a raft of regulat…
No, issuing regulation against drugs on their own territory is not a "war". But deploying Royal Navy to acquire foreign territory for trade is the "war".
>We find your country is sixty or seventy thousand li [three li make one mile, ordinarily] from China Yet there are barbarian ships that strive to come here for trade for the purpose of making a great profit. The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians. That is to say, the great profit made by barbarians is all taken from the rightful share of China. By what right do they then in return use the poisonous dru…
That’s the history of the church and king much from 800AD. At its peak, the British stole 200+ trillion wealth rom India and its other colonies.
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Which is what I find strange about the Century of Humiliation. Why is China losing a minor war that killed a couple thousand Chinese soldiers a great humiliation while getting outright conquered at least twice (once by the Mongols and once by the Manchu) isn't? Tens of millions of Chinese died during the Manchu invasion of China. The Qing forced every Han Chinese male to shave their forehead and wear a queue on the t…
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Chinese court rejects Canadian’s appeal against death sentence for drug smuggling https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/10/china/china-robert-schellenbe... Singapore executes disabled Malaysian convicted in drug case https://www.npr.org/2022/04/27/1094965375/singapore-executes...
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Which is what I find strange about the Century of Humiliation. Why is China losing a minor war that killed a couple thousand Chinese soldiers a great humiliation while getting outright conquered at least twice (once by the Mongols and once by the Manchu) isn't? Tens of millions of Chinese died during the Manchu invasion of China. The Qing forced every Han Chinese male to shave their forehead and wear a queue on the t…
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And queue the first Opium War. The Chinese did indeed start a crackdown on opium trade after this, including sending troops to seize warehouses full of it. This action sparked off the first Opium War with Britian, and kicking off the so-called Chinese “Century of Humiliation”.
It is important to stress that China was ruled, at the time, by a government that was widely seen as "Nonchinese" -- this sense of external rule surely had a great deal to do with the emergence of mass addiction, as the Ching state that imposed the laws had serious legitimacy issues (and would collapse less than a century later.)
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To be frank, it's clear the Brits were the baddies here. They used guns to force a state that had banned terrible drugs to unban it. Whether that state was totally nice or democratic or "Chinese" or whatever value you cherish, is besides the point. It does not legitimize any of what GB did during either Opium War, and therefore I disagree that it's "important to stress".
Some people think banning drugs is a bad idea, and that it's better to allow free trade. A good response to that would be, "yeah, but it was for the Chinese to make their minds up about that, not the British!" And a good response to that might be: "when you say the Chinese made their minds up, are you talking about a democratic process?"
It was the early 19th century. You could count the number of democratic countries on one hand. (If you counted countries where only men could vote)
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In the context of the linked letter, quite the opposite...
do you know why he specifically mentioned about England need tea leaf? because he trust that if foreigners do not drink tea, they will constipate and die...