The Empire returns the favor

Black tea : the gift from China to the English
Black tea has been used as a medicine & a meditation tool: If you are cold, Black tea will warm you; if you are too heated, Black tea will cool you; if you are depressed, Black tea will cheer you; if you are excited Black tea will calm you. Such is the beverage brought from China to England by the English.

Poison Opium: the English returns the favor
“It is a curious circumstance that we grow poppy in our Indian territories to poison the people of China in return for a wholesome beverage which they prepare almost exclusively for us” John Barrow (1836-1890)

Rise & Fall of a Great Maritime Power: the Chinese
The Ming dynasty (1368-1644) of China founded by a Han Chinese (a subset of the Chinese nation, the descendents of the Dragon, which constitute about 92 percent of population of China) peasant & former Buddhist monk turned rebel army leader kept the Mongol invaders at bay in the land & launched expeditions in China seas & the Indian ocean. Sailing to Vietnam, Java, Sumatra, Sri Lanka & the east coast of Africa, China became the most powerful naval force in the world. Black tea was one of the commodities of trade during those expeditions. Maritime expeditions of China came to an abrupt end in 1433. A combination of manifold factors such as Mongolian invasions from north, concept of agrarian based society & the misconception that commercial ventures, expansion, discovery, human interaction on national level with other nations is alien to the Chinese culture & arrogance in a belief that there’s was the most superior civilization must have contributed towards this unfortunate termination of maritime expeditions of China.

Rise of an all conquering Maritime Power in the West: the English
In 1588 mighty Spanish Armada was put to sword & fire in the seas by the English sea-dogs. In 1591 English merchants were granted permission for commercial expeditions to the exotic orient by Queen Elizabeth. In 1600 the forerunner to East India Company was formed for trade initially with East Indies & then for Indian subcontinent & China. The Honourable East India Company (HEIC) formed in 1708 traded mainly in Black tea, cotton, silk, indigo dye, saltpeter and opium. During the period the English had been conquering the seas, the Chinese had no idea they had declined & no match to the western commercial & maritime powers. East India Company muscled their way into trade at the kingdom of Bantam, which extended over most of western Java & Southern Sumatra with already well established Dutch & Portuguese merchants. Bantom was the commercial hub for trade in Black tea from China, spices from Philippines & pepper from India.

Black tea in exchange of Silver bullion at Canton
China was closed to the Europeans except for the Portuguese at the trading enclave of Macao. Bantom was the favored port of Chinese merchants, middlemen & migrants. Chinese ships unloaded silk & porcelain; Chinese merchants traded, brokered & gambled, all in equal enthusiasm. It was not until 1699, European ships were allowed into the great port of Guangzhou (called Canton by the English) located about 120km northwest of Hong Kong on the navigable Pearl River, the third longest river in China (2200km) that flows into South China Sea between the seaports of Hong Kong & Macao.
Among the French, Dutch, Austrian, Swedish & Danish ships, the fleet of British ships was the leader of the hungry pack. Black tea acquired status of prime commodity of trading in China for the British. But then British had no commodities that of considerable value for the Chinese to engage in bilateral barter. China being the only country then that exported Black tea, East India Company had no option but to pay in silver bullion in the form of Spanish Silver coin, the Carolus resulting in a drain in the British reserves of Silver.

The Poison Opium in exchange of the beverage Black tea
The Honourable East India Company, also called John Company, with a tongue in cheek, lived up to its good name & found the substitution for silver bullion in Patna, Bihar, India: opium. A substitution, spiced with such cynicism to the boot, would hardly be found. The drug trafficking John Company went onto become the mightiest monopoly in any commodity that the world has ever known. The commodity was Black tea.
Though opium was introduced to China some time between the fourth & seventh centuries & then again manufactured & used for medical treatment of Dysentery, Cholera & other deceases as early as 15th century, it was not used as a narcotic till the 18th century. Europeans had been trading opium as well as tobacco. John Company with its mandate to “levy war or make peace” controlling vast tracts of land in India, the cultivation of opium in Patna resulted in a continuous supply of opium to Canton. Britain’s governor-general of India wrote in 1830, “We are taking measures for extending the cultivation of the poppy, with a view to a large increase in the supply of opium.”
Though the Chinese Imperial government prohibited sale of opium in China in 1729, Honourable East India Company continued to engage in opium trafficking. The Chinese government responded with a threat to cut down on volume of Black Tea export.

The World’s First Drug War with a view of Black tea
The world’s first drug war, the Opium War of 1839-42 began when the Chinese imperial government ships demanded the surrender of illegal cargo of opium-carrying merchant vessels of the British. The confrontation resulted in Capt. Elliot, superintendent of the British fleet, requesting the governor-general of India for British battle ships. The Chinese junks with antiquated artillery, didn’t stand a chance against the British battleships. The British were far from satisfied with the Treaty of Nanking (1842) which ended the first opium war & impatient to open more ports for them & the Chinese to legalize opium. The result was the second Opium War in 1856. Eventually the Chinese did legalize opium, & England continued to export Indian opium to China until 1911.
Joshua Rowntree in “The Imperial Drug Trade,” published in London in 1905 wrote that the British were “in a great hurry to make money out of the East, and the gunboats were found to clear the way quickly. All vestiges of compassion for mankind had been swept away by the silver stream of rupees which poured into the Calcutta Exchequer.
The India Gazette, a British publication, wrote about the sack of Chusan in 1840: “A more complete pillage could not be conceived than what took place. Every house was broken open, every drawer and box ransacked, the streets strewn with fragments of furniture, pictures, tables, chairs, grain of all sorts — the whole set off by the dead or the living bodies of those who had been unable to leave the city from the wounds received from our merciless guns. … The plunder ceased only when there was nothing to take or destroy.”

Opium wars were undertaken with a consummate combination of injustice and baseness.
Thomas Arnold (1795-1842), a British educator & historian, an Eminent Victorian of Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) wrote “This war with China . . . really seems to me so wicked as to be a national sin of the greatest possible magnitude, and it distresses me very deeply. Cannot any thing be done by petition or otherwise to awaken men’s minds to the dreadful guilt we are incurring? I really do not remember, in any history, of a war undertaken with such combined injustice and baseness. Ordinary wars of conquest are to me far less wicked, than to go to war in order to maintain smuggling, and that smuggling consisting in the introduction of a demoralizing drug, which the government of China wishes to keep out, and which we, for the lucre of gain, want to introduce by force; and in this quarrel are going to burn and slay in the pride of our supposed superiority.”