Empire: World History - 247. Victorian Narcos: Tea Starts A Drug War (Ep 1)

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

How did the British taste for tea start a war over the right to sell drugs to China? When did tea become fashionable in Britain? How did the Dutch bring tea to India?  William and Anita explore how the nation’s love of tea created a domino effect that led to the East India Company running a more prolific international drug cartel than Pablo Escobar…  _____________ Empire Club: Become a member of the Empire Club to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, our exclusive newsletter, and access to our members’ chatroom on Discord! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com.  Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk  Blue Sky: @empirepoduk  X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durepool. Now, we're starting a new series for you. And actually, it's got a great title. It was a working title.

but I think we should just slap it on the whole thing. Victorian narcos, has that got your attention yet? I like it. It's a good one, isn't it? But this is a story that really has enormous geopolitical ramifications even to this day. So it involves things that get you high, frankly, opium, yes, and if you are of a more staid lifestyle like me, cups of tea. But these things are entwined inextricably

in one of the most dramatic periods in history. It's a very, very odd story. It's the story of how the British went to war for the right to sell drugs. I mean, it's so the reverse of everything that you expect and obviously everything that's going on today. The war on drugs today is trying to stop drug cartels from selling drugs into the West. That's right. It largely frowns on the drugs. Yes, you're right.

It does. Well, this one is cheerleading it. Literally, the British fought two mid-19th century wars for the right. to sell drugs to China. And they got on their high horse, and they made speeches in Parliament about how the Chinese had no right to stop them selling drugs. It's a very, very odd story. But the more you investigate it, the weirder and the deeper it goes.

Yeah, I mean, so weird and so deep. And also, you know, first, I mean, tea, let's just, for one second, just consider tea. Tea, the importance of tea. So there's a fantastic quote. I'm going to read you from Thomas to Quincy. You've got very excited about this quote. I am, because it melds everything together. So, Thomas de Quincy famously wrote Confessions of an English Opium eater.

You all knew that. You didn't need me to tell you, but this is a quote from that. Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities, will always be the favourite beverage of the intellectual. So we're also going to chart this sort of love affair that Britain has with tea and why it gives it such enormous economic geopolitical power. This goes to the very heart of why the world looks a little bit like it does. today. So for China, to have this imposed on them, to have, you know, the British saying,

how dare you stop us from selling you opium? Who the hell do you think you are? Led to what the Chinese call the century of humiliation. And that has set the die in Chinese minds, certainly, for this resurgence of Chinese pride, a resurgence of Chinese muscularity, which leads directly to the creation of the Chinese Communist Party, of Mao, of this isolationist realm that decides it is going to fight back and redefine itself and never again will be told what is allowed to have in its borders or not. So it is a real imperial story with, as William says, completely unexpected twists and turns. There's a very funny story which I love, which is when George Osborne and David Cameron went to Beijing to try and improve British-Chinese relations a decade ago,

it happened to be in November and it was Remembrance Day. So they, of course, to avoid getting sort of lectured by the Daily Mail, they arrived with their poppies in their lapels, and got off the plane in Beijing wearing red poppies. It means something else in China. Means something else when you're getting over a century of humiliation over opium and the poppies that create those things. And you've just come back from Hong Kong, haven't you? I mean, you've just come back from a place where you've seen this and the indelible print

that this period of history has left. I have been in Hong Kong researching this, in fact, both tea and the whole story of the Opium War. And what struck me, as well as the fact that it's so central to understand modern China and how modern China sees itself now, not as some sort of new arrevis on the scene, as it sometimes talked about in the Western press. But it is China coming back to its old position as the Middle Kingdom at the center of the world, taking its rightful place as the main power in the world, and recovering from this century of humiliation. But what also, I think, is crucial and fascinating is, I don't think any of us really understand how important opium was

for the whole British imperial exercise. It wasn't just the two opium wars and this sort of, you know, strange urge to sell drugs for the hell of it to China. It's at the heart of the whole imperial project. Cities like Bombay, Calcutta and Singapore are there now and are as large and as rich as they are because of the trade in opium. And it had multiple effects. It not only covered the balance of payment problem with the British, who were buying so much tea by the early 19th century, that they were massively in debt to the Chinese.

And opium not only wiped that out, but actually gave the East Indy Company and the British government a positive balance of trade. But what it also does is that it sort of rebalances world trade, so that for the only time in all of history, silver and gold are flowing from China and the east to Europe for almost the whole world history up to that point from the Roman times onwards all those episodes we did on the Golden Road my book and the story of how Roman gold used to pour into Indian pockets.

That's the beginning of, you know, a thousand, five hundred years of Western money ending up in Indian purses and Chinese purses. But this whole episode with the opium reverses that and changes. it. But it also, in a very weird way, provides the British government with money because they tax the tea and it's the tax on tea, as we're going to hear more in this episode, which, you know, finances British imperial expansion elsewhere. So in every way, this is a much, much more central and important story than you'd expect. Let's start with the old hackneyed phrase, which is, you know, I wouldn't do that for all the tea in China. So let's start with the actual origin

of tea and its relationship with China. So we need. So we need. know that the oldest tea has been discovered by archaeologists going back 2,150 years, and it was found in the tomb of a Chinese emperor. Tell us, tell us more about that. Tea is indigenous to Southeast Asia and to China. The monsoon rains provide the sort of dowsing that you need to get tea growing, and the warmth and the wetness of that part of the world suits the tea tree. And very early on, people begin to trade in it. And while as you say, there are tea leaves found in imperial tombs dating back 4,000 years. This is very early in man's history. And in my trip to Hong Kong, I saw teapots that still survive completely intact

from about 250 BC. But from that period, it's a major item of trade in China. And there are trails leading to tea, going to places like Tibet and Burma and Mongolia. And in the Teng period, which is the kind of, you know, the golden age of imperial China, it becomes a massive pan-Chinese drink. It's the archetypal drink associated, perhaps bizarrely and not necessarily, as you'd imagine, with scholarship and with poetry. It was all part of a thing. If you were the Confucian scholar, you'd yearn for the countryside,

you'd love to be next to some waterfall in a forest in the mountains, drinking a cup of tea and writing poetry. That was the ideal. That was what brilliant young men wanted to do. But the other thing that is interesting about tea in China is that it's not just the way we drink tea. I mean, even in those earliest days, it was part of ceremonial ritual, wasn't it? I've been lucky enough to do a tea ceremony when I was.

Have you? Yes, yes, I did. I mean, it's very elaborate. You know, there's a lot of, you know, silence and you've got to be solemn, and it's a reverential act of drinking tea. Well, people took it very seriously. It wasn't just, you know, having a cup of tea. As early as 780, there is a book called The Classic of Tea, written by a scholar called Lou You. And he describes how tea stimulates the mental faculties, promotes a temperate lifestyle, and provokes the liveliness of poetic feelings. That's a quote. which is not exactly how we think of a cup of tea. We think of sort of having something mid-morning to restore you.

But it is a far more high-minded and sort of scholarly business if you're an 8th century Chinese intellectual. What I find fascinating about this, and this reminds me of our coffee episode, that this predates any notion of the fact that there is caffeine or an active ingredient in this, but both those who discover, you know, those goat-chewed coffee beans and also, you know, sort of the leaves from the tea plant.

they do recognise this alertness that it gives you, or almost give it sort of this spiritual aspect because it changes the way you think and look at the world. And that is caffeine. That's got to be the caffeination of the drink. I'm really interested, though, in the way that the taste spreads. Because if you give a young child, I have a young child, a cup of tea for the first time. And, you know, we douse ours with milk and sugar, but just a cup of tea straight, it is bitter. And, you know, a small child will always reject it and go, what's that?

Give me juice. At what point do people say, actually, this is gorgeous. I like this more. This is a gorgeous drink. When does that happen? How does the taste start spreading around? As you said, it's turned into a great sort of Tamasha, as I say in India. It's a great ceremony. And even today, in Hong Kong last week, buying my tea, I was given a whole sort of A4 instruction for how the different kinds of teas,

whether it was a Lapsang or it was Jasmine Pearls or an Oolong, how all these different things should be only, have hot water in them for one or two or four minutes, and then you've got to withdraw the tea leaves, you know, sort of dunking a tea bag in for half an hour like you might do in a British kappa. And very early on, also, as well as being associated with poetry, it's associated with Buddhism. For some reason, it's regarded as something cleansing, purifying, and goes very well with the whole Buddhist faith. And it's as a Zen Buddhist drink that it spreads to Japan in one direction. And then with Buddhism, that it spreads to Mongolia, and there the Mongols are the first people to add milk and cream to it, which the Chinese would have regarded as an atrocity.

A sacrilegious way of treating your tea. And then by the 10th or 11th century, it reaches Persia, where it's the Persians who add sugar for the first time in a sort of crystalline form. As with many things that we talk about on this series, there be Jesuits. So I have read that it is the same conduit, this sort of spread of tea, through the missionaries. You know, you just mentioned Japan, and there were Jesuit missionaries in Japan. And are they the ones who take this discovery and then move it around the world where people start adding their own taste enhances to it? Exactly that. There's this character, Mathieu Ricci, who is a famous Jesuit missionary in Japan, and he is the first European to write about what you.

a tea ceremony. He meets a tea master called Sen Rekyu, who's a kind of Zen Buddhist tea drinker, and it's all part of his ritual. So Mathieu Ricci records this as Jesuit recording something spiritual. But very soon, his more commercially-minded compatriots realize that this is something that can be traded. And not only the Portuguese, but the Dutch get onto it pretty quick. Before you can trade it, you've got to get it out of the hands of the Chinese, because don't they grow it? I mean, the things are the Dutch aren't growing it. Others don't have the plants, do they? So, I mean, how can they even countenance the fact that they might grow this stuff and start selling it around the world? So the place where that sort of transference happens

is the island of Java in Indonesia. And the Dutch have got Batavia. One story we will definitely do on this podcast at some point is the whole story of the Dutch wars over spices. Our friend, Giles Milton, who did our Smirner episode. Oh, he's fabulous. I wrote a wonderful book on Nathaniel's Nutmeg about this. But when the Dutch are opening up their markets in Batavia, which is the port of modern Jakarta today, they have Chinese traders coming in selling tea in these Dutch-owned markets. And that's how the Dutch get onto it. And it is the Dutch, counterintuitively, who first bring it to India.

And we hear about it in Surat, which is a port we've talked a lot about on this pod. It's the great mogul port. It's the port where Sir Thomas Rowe turns up and falls out with the mogul governor and where his chaplain gets into a fight. Is that the story? It's his cook, isn't it? It's his cook. It's his cook, you're right. It's his cook gets into a massive punch-up.

A very undiplomatic start to his mission. Not good, not good. But also there's a really lovely thing here because there are two pronunciations of tea in the world. So from India, we call it chai. But you also have tea. And in Germany it's tea. So this is the bifurcation when the Dutch get involved, that you have this different pronunciation that's launched into the world. I mean, just talk a bit about that because I love this story.

So I didn't know until I was researching this, that actually both those words have a Chinese origin. And one is from North China and one is from South China. And I think it's Tay which goes into the European stream. And chai that goes east, which is why, you know, sort of eastern countries we call it chai. Or as, you know, you good people like to call them chai last. I can't tell you what that does to an Indian sensibility, but it's not a good thing. Not a good thing, chai latte. But look, so you've got chai for one half of the world because it comes from one part of China,

and you've got tea because of the other traders. The Dutch East India Company, though, you say, you know, they're the first to jump onto this. And they do say very quickly that tea was easily the most profitable product that they have ever dabbled in because the money starts rolling in quickly, doesn't it? We've got the first details of a Brit having a cup of tea. Actually happens in Surat, a character called Peter Mundy. And he travels from Surat where he first encounters tea. And Surat is in Gujarat, which is a great trading port.

I'm very well known for diamond merchants. But also, because it's a port, lots of traders come into Surat. It's an incredibly wealthy city in India. So Peter Mundy washes up in Surat and then what? And he says there is a herb. with water boiled in it, he says, it must be drank warm and is a compted wholesome. And that rather sort of ungrammatical sentence is the first thing written by English one about tea, the first of many, many thousands of pages which will be written,

because it becomes astonishingly central to the British economy. But oddly enough, it's not the British who are even first, second or third of the starting blocks at the beginning. It goes to Portugal. It goes to Holland, even goes to France before it gets to Britain. And in Louis XIV's 17th century France, it becomes a very fancy drink. Parisian physicians call it the impertinent novelty of the age. Cardinal Mazarin takes it for his gout, while Racine regards it as the perfect drink for an indictment philosopher. Oh, that's interesting.

So, I mean, that's early on, though. But it's, again, so the spiritualist sort of leached out of it now, and it is the medicinal. It is the qualities, you know, again, caffeine. They don't know it's caffeine, but it's caffeine. It makes you sort of perk up, and that must be what they're talking about. I mean, I don't think it does anything for gout at all, but, you know, it makes you feel perky. So people thought it was some kind of elixir of some sort. But it's something, you know, incredibly exotic.

And just like coffee had been regarded as an aphrodisiac, because I think they knew that the Turks had it. So therefore it must be something sort of sexy and to do with Harim's. So it's regarded as a panacea when it arrives in England. And the person who brings it to England is the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza. Just remind me, Catherine Braganza is the same person who got Bombay as a dowry present. Exactly. Antachias. She is a great sir, yes.

Okay. So, you know, she gets a whole city as a dowry present. So Catherine of Bruganza, the wife of King Charles II, she is. is Portuguese by origin. And the first European nation to enter the Indian Ocean is Portugal, as William was saying. So they have this sort of network of colonies, the Portuguese. And, you know, we talked about Jesuits, so being the sort of slipstream of bringing new things back. But they also have Macau in southern China. It's being leased to the Portuguese in 1557 by, you know, the ruling Ming dynasty. But in 1662, Catherine of Braganza, she gets married. Portugal

has been consuming Chinese products for over a century, and a chinoiserie and everything to do with China is exotic and it's funky and it's sexy, as you were saying. So the practice of tea drinking among the upper classes is already there. So Catherine Baganza and her mate will know about the tea. So she brings it as part of this dowry, if you like, when she gets married, a casket of tea, and I love the detail on this, a casket of tea in a set of six small islands that will become Bombay. It's such a great story.

There's a very nice story, which I think I've told before on this podcast, which I love, that when the marriage contract arrives in London, the map has somehow got detached. And there's lots of puzzlement in London about where this place, which is spelled Bombay, B-U-M-B-Y-E, when it arrives. And there's great discussion in court about where Bambi might be. And they decide it must be somewhere in Brazil. Right. But interesting. I mean, it's Bombay, which is like Mumbai, which is now it's reverted back to the Indian way of saying it. So you can see that whole stem. It was Mumbai or Bombay before the Brits bombayed it up. Do people value the tea more than they value this weird set of islands that they've lost them out for Bombay? Do they care very much about that? Are they more excited about the tea casket? Well, we hear a lot about the tea. And there's a royalist poet from this period called Edmund Waller who writes a poem. on tea in honour of the Queen's birthday and champions the best of queens and the best of herbs,

as he calls it. And this, again, I think, is the first poem in English about tea. And it is more kind of Stuart wives, another one, Mary of Modena, who brings it to Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh in 1680. So the Stuart's some big early movers of tea leaves up there. They were. But, I mean, that fits, doesn't it? That tracks. If you've got a relationship with the Catholic world and the Catholics are drinking.

you know, it must be great. Let's take a break now. And after the break, we'll talk about the migration of this tea. So, I mean, it's in Scotland. Catherine Obranza has brought it here. It's already big among the stewards. But how does it filter down to the rest of the British Isles? Join us then.

So welcome back to our Empire episode on tea. And this is the first episode of our story of how opium came to be at the heart of the British Empire. And as we explained in the first half, it has this weird link to the tea trade. And we were discussing just before the break how tea gets to England and how, first of all, it's Catherine Bruganza, but then the East India Company gets on that pretty quickly. And there's a retired or returned East India Company sailor called John Ovington, who takes it upon himself to become a sort of propagandist for tea. And he writes this long tract about how wonderful tea is.

A lot of the ideas come clearly from China because it talks about how it's purifying, how it's healing, and how it encourages temperance, which is a great feature in the history of tea because people compare it to alcohol. Remember, this is a period where the Brits are constantly getting drunk, when the Brits in India in particular drinking alcohol because it doesn't have amoeba in it in the way that water does. And so Ovington says, if the drinking of tea were universal here as it is in eastern countries, we should quickly find that men might be more cheerful with sobriety.

and witty, as opposed to loutish and badly behaved. And so you then get the building of Vauxhall Gardens, which becomes this very fashionable walking spot, specifically laid out as a sort of place full of nature, a garden with trees and flowers, where you can take tea in this sort of semi-rural setting. And Vauxhall Gardens becomes the first big sort of tea garden of the British house. But at this point where tea is all the rage,

and again, you know, the trajectory, is the same as coffee, you know, because it is a social thing. You have it with friends. You have witty repartee. It gets that whole, you know, panache that went with coffee in the coffee houses as well. But are they buying all this tea from China? Is it just only China that is selling them the tea that is now so in vogue? Well, not initially, no, because they haven't opened up trade relations with China yet. They're not going to sell. So where are they getting it from? They're getting it from the Portuguese and the Dutch and getting it via Java and by Macau. And they have got it, just as a reminder, the Portuguese, because they have Java and Macau, they have tea plants because of the Chinese towing and throwing between Macau. They're allowed to have it because the Chinese are quite protectionist at this point. So how does that sort of transfer work?

No, I think they're growing it in Java. I think they're just trading it through Java. I think that's the trajectory. The tea leaves are being traded. China is still tea central. So that's important. That's important. When it comes to the imperial story, It is why other countries are slightly, even now, wobbling, because they may be getting it through Java, which means they're paying twice. They're paying a broker, and they're also paying whoever the broker is paying. So there's a great uplift. And if you were sitting in an exchequer thinking, hang on, how much are we paying? What if we had our own? Or what if we had direct trade routes to China?

Then, you know, we could cut out the brokers. At least that uplift would be gone and it would be cheaper. So that's exactly it. But initially, I think it's not in search of tea that the British go to China. They go in search of sugar and ginger on their first expedition, which is in 1717. But they buy some tea while they're there. It doesn't want something that they've set out to buy. But they get some.

And it goes so quickly when it arrives in London that the company tells them to get some more. And the orders in the next voyage are bring as much tea in the ship as you can conveniently stow. And by 1725, which is only eight years later, the company is importing 250,000 pounds of tea into England from Canton alone every single year. And by that stage, it already displaces silk as the primary object of trade with China or porcelain, which is the other thing the 18th century British are keen to get their hands on. And it's an extraordinary story how quickly this exotic foreign drink, which had not been known in Britain at all a century earlier, grows at this astronomical figure growing by nearly 10,000

percent in the course of this century, so that by 1805, the company will be shipping 24 million pounds of tea to Britain. It becomes Britain's national beverage, and as someone in government describes it practically unnecessary of life. It does that in a matter of 50 years. So by the 18th century, we've got a country that is desperate for a cup of tea, jonesing for a cup of tea. We've got a company that is clearing the underdecks to bring the tea over. Where's money being made here? Like, who's making money and how is it being made here?

So initially it is the company that's making all the money. And they're making so much money that if you go to one of those lovely National Trust houses that looks like Colin Firth has just been steaming through the lake in a pair of reaches, the chances are that it's made from the British and China trade. So I'm struggling to listen to you now. You've given me that image. But okay, carry on. Fight through it, William. Fight through it. Go on. You know where I'm heading with it. I definitely do. But guess, carry on. So the British government then begin to realize that this is something that they can make

money out of and they slap taxes on the import of tea. And taxes go up from, I think, 15% to 75% to 125% and by the mid-18th century, it's the main source of revenue for the British government. So there's this very nice little phrase by the historian Erica Rappapour, who's written a wonderful book on the history of tea. And she said, during the 18th century, tea paid for war, but war also paid for tea. It's financing the government. And in a sense, it's the engine now, which is provoking further British imperial expansion. And throughout much of the 18th and 19th centuries, the tax on tea accounts for nearly a tenth of all British government revenue.

So, you know, all the expenses of Britain at the time when it's most powerful and expanding most vigorously overseas, all over India and so on, it's the tea trade, which is underpinning this. It's also making a lot of money for those who are involved in merchant shipping. Because such is the demand that if you're able to charge whatever you like for shipping the stuff over. I mean, the taxes are on one side. But if you're making money on this voracious appetite for a product, then you're able to sort of bolster your own armada of merchant ships as well. So you sort of see a growth in that area as well of Britain and British shipping becoming much more powerful.

this time. And there comes a darker side to this, too, because the British like to have their tea with sugar, like you said your sons do. And therefore, as the demand for tea grows, the demand for sugar grows, where does the sugar come from? It comes from the West Indies from slave plantations. And so in order to keep the British refreshed and restored, you not only have this entire economy in the East, but you also have a slave economy with enslaved, Africans being shipped across the Middle Passage. We did a whole series on this a couple of years ago to the slave plantations in the Caribbean to grow sugar so the British can get their tea. But meanwhile, in the East, just to leave the Caribbean out of it for a second, there is another

problem, which is that the amount of money that the British are paying into Chinese pockets is causing a massive balance of payment problem. The West, is hemorrhaging money and silver into Chinese pockets. And the British, particularly the British East Sydney Company, which is, which is organizing the strave, have a problem because they've just now beginning to seize land in India. And they are no longer having to pour money into Indian pockets because they now, you know, have taken control by force and by military means.

They've seized areas like Bengal, so they don't have to pay as much for their cloth. but they're now losing all their silver into Chinese pockets. And the East India Company outlay on Chinese tea grows towards the end of the 18th century to as much as $9 million a year. They're paying into the Chinese treasury. And you will not guess Anita who comes up with the solution to this. Go on. Surprise me. Shock me. Surprise you.

It's our old friend, Alexander, Turimple. Do you remember him? from, we did the episode on The Endeavour. Really? Is it really? Is it really? I didn't know this actually until I was reading John Kay's wonderful book, The Honourable Company. So, okay, well, I mean, we have to then. All right. Who the hell was Alexander Duremberg.

So, Alexandra Poole appeared actually in a Christmas episode two years ago, when we did the story of the Endeavour with our friend Peter Moore. Do you remember that? Wonderful episode. Remember it very well. After our Christmas lunch, which we'll never do again. We're not doing that again. That was a bad and unprofessional idea, I think.

We had rather too much refreshment at our lunch and ended up talking over each other and poor Peter got completely trampled underfoot. But he was telling the story of the endeavour and this was where we met Alexander in Durember. Alexander was the cartographer and hydrographer of the East India Company. And there's a lovely story that when the company captured Pondicherry, the French, centre in India. Alexander brought all the British maps down from Madras to the map room in the French headquarters. And they had captured, I think, all the Spanish or Portuguese maps of the

whole region. And Alexander put them all together like a jigsaw and realized that there was a large landmass where we now know Australia is. And it was Alexander who wrote this book called the Great Southern Continent and raised money for an expedition to go and find it. And then at the last minute, he wasn't given command of the vessel. And being the harumphy, bad-tempered and slightly obstinate, not slightly, very obstinate man that he actually was, he said, well, if you're not putting me in charge of the whole expedition, only in charge of the scientific bit,

I'm not going. And he sat on the key in Leith. And this other character who was just the job being captain called Captain James Cook went off and discovered Australia in one of the great errors of history. but for which everyone would now know, you know, Dyrunpool family history far better, and the name would be better spelt. Anyway, it's one of the great missed opportunities, in my view, of world history. Yes, no, no, we will regret that decision so much,

because then we'd be able to talk about Duremberg so much more than we already do on this bloody podcast. But anyway, the point of the story is that he spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia and mapped the Malacca Straits and so on for the first time for the British and came up with this idea of this triangular trade that it may be that the Chinese don't want to buy anything from the British, not even our clocks and whirligigs and all the clever industrial things that we did. They liked nothing.

And they might not want anything from India other than a little bit of cotton and a little bit of saltpeta, which they used for their gunpowder. But they did like stuff from Southeast Asia. They like pepper and spices, and they like opium. And he just put this casually in the letter. But it's the first time any Brit has the idea that you can sell opium to the Chinese. And so it's the beginning of this whole terrible story, I'm ashamed to say. So he's the one to blame.

I mean, it's clever, but it leads to an utter catastrophe. How proud do you feel? I mean, seriously, I sometimes worry about you because you offer these things. And then, you know, we end that conversation. and I feel like we haven't followed through on the therapy. I mean, he does end up screwing a country. What do you think when you suddenly look into this sort of background? He's only doing it as a three-way trade.

He's not responsible for growing poppies or even suggesting that poppies is going to be the main thing. But he, no, he plays a role in the story. As you may have noticed, the dribbles are rarely on the right side of history. No, I think it's extraordinary. The American Civil War or Ireland at least are rising. Or at Caledin, they're invariably on the wrong side. On the wrong side. But you're not.

You're on the right side. Thank you, Elita. You're very sweet. Thank you very much. As far as we know, as far as it goes. We'll see what skeletons fall out of that wardrobe a little later on. But look, shall we leave it there? And then maybe when we come back in the next episode of this series, we shall talk about,

Now the idea has been planted like a poppy seed in the soil of opium being a commodity worth trading. And again, this is really important. It's the balance of payments that is everything. A country does not like to see its wealth leached out in one direction unless those people are buying something back. We're recording this on the day that Trump is imposing tariffs to try and sort out his balance of payments problem. So this is a continual issue in history. Yeah, no, I think that's a brilliant analogy. So tariffs, balance of payments, you can see why this is such a contemporary story in many ways.

And join us for the next episode when we talk about how the poppy rebalances these economies. And if you want to hear the next episode right now, all you need to do is sign up to Empirepoduk.com, Empirepoduk.com. Just become a member of the club and you get early releases of these things. So if you really are one of those people who cannot wait and I know what it's like, do that. And you'll have early access. But till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnden. And goodbye from me, William Duremberg.