On This Day in History: June 26

The First Opium War

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You ever watch Narcos on Netflix or those Sicario movies and think about how evil the Latin American drug cartels are? Well, let me tell you a story about one of the biggest drug dealers in history: The British Empire.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: June 26, 1843--

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries Britain had a large trade deficit with China, and one way to balance that out was to take massive quantities of opium from its territories in India then turn around and sell it to the Chinese. But it was all totally legit and not evil at all because it was done by the British East India Company, which was also referred to as the “Honourable East India Company,” so of course they were on the right side of history, right?

Over the course of a century Chinese emperors issued several edicts making opium illegal, but that didn’t stop the Brits. In 1839, troubled by both the mind-fucking of its populace and the outflow of silver, the Chinese seized 3,000 tons of opium in the port city of Canton (now Guangzhou) and blockaded all foreign ships from entering.

The Brits went all Bugs Bunny: “Of course you realize this means war.”

And war it was. From 1840-42 the British Navy won a series of conclusive battles against the Chinese, resulting in the Treaty of Nanking going into effect on June 26, 1843. It was the first of what the Chinese would come to call “the unequal treaties,” which isn’t foreboding at all.

The terms of the treaty were “We’re gonna import enough opium to fuck up half a continent and you’re gonna buy it.” The British also got an assload of financial reparations for the opium confiscated in 1839, and, most importantly, they got Hong Kong.

Hong Kong Island was made a crown colony, ceded to Queen Victoria “in perpetuity” to provide British traders their own harbor for their opium-loaded ships. In 1860 the territory was expanded to include the Kowloon peninsula, the mainland portion of Hong Kong. In 1898 the colony further expanded with a 99-year lease. The territories were transferred back to the People’s Republic of China on July 1, 1997.

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