Empire: World History - 255. Victorian Narcos: From Opium To Fentanyl (Ep 9)

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

What led to the Second Opium War? Why wasn’t China colonised by Europeans? When did China start referring to this period as the “century of humiliation” and how did this narrative shape nationalism in the 20th century? Anita and William are joined by Stephen R. Platt, author of Imperial Twilight, for the final instalment of this series in which they discuss the Second Opium War and how its legacy continues to shape geopolitics today. Love History? Get our exclusive History Today deal! You can get started with a 3-month trial for only £5 at https://historytoday.com/empire  ----------------- 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.mpower.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Derepple. Quite excited about this episode. We've been fan-girling and fan-boying about him, but the author of been, Imperial Twilight, dismantling the myths of the opium war, Stephen Platt. We've been talking about you

a lot during this series and about your wonderful book. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me here. And Steve has got a new book that's coming up very soon, May the 13th. Tell us quickly about that. Everyone is your fan on this program now. It's a World War II book about a U.S. Marine who embedded with the Chinese Communist Army learned their tactics of guerrilla warfare and then imported them into the U.S. Marines. So like Julia, you've moved forward in time from the Opium Wars. Yeah, there's so much to dig through in China's history. Everything is connected, though, William, as we know. So look, just remind everybody where we were last and where we are now. We, in the last episode,

had the kind of sickening story of the first Opium War. But the horror is that the British weaponry, and particularly the British ships and the British guns, are so far in advance of what the Qing have, that each of these engagements in the First Open War is really a slaughter and a massacre. The British are disgusted with themselves, even as they fight this war. Was that something you found in the diaries, Stephen, when you were reading this? Absolutely. I mean, there were communications from British naval officers to their commanders, basically begging not to have to attack any more cities in China, you know, writing how this is murder. There is no honor to be won in continuing this war. And it's something that it was enormously controversial to the British public as well.

Really, there was no glory to be won here. And one of the things that emerges in your narrative is that quite often when the British enter the city, they find that everyone has themselves committed suicide, the lot of the troops before they've even engaged, they're hanging themselves or hanging the citizenry, that there's a kind of massive pile of corpses even before the British opened fire. It opens up the divisions between the Manchu government and the Han Chinese population of China. And, you know, there are incidents where you have, you know, military officers locking the fort in order to prevent their soldiers from running away when the British come. And so they're just blasted to smithereens by the British naval cannons. Not for the first

opium war, but the second opium war. We have, you know, photographic evidence of this and just, you know, the dead bodies strewn about. As well as the letters that you've got, you mean, you've got British newspapers that, you know, have signed on a lot for the cause of going to this war, thanks to Jardine and his lobbying and his buying of journalists. But you do have the Times, which had always been a strong supporter of this kind of, let's flex abroad, saying that this is a dishonorable war. The paper calls it a dishonorable war. So there's a tidal shift, at least going on somewhat in the press, but it's too late, really, because the deed is done. The quote from the Times continues, we should be ashamed of ourselves and our principles. If we allowed its intrinsic,

brilliancy to obscure its true character to render us forgetful of its most questionable origin. Up to this point, China had always been viewed as a friendly empire to the British. They were frustrated about their trade there, but there had never been any grounds for hostility of any kind. And the idea that this empire that they traded with that gave them all of their tea to, you know, gladden the breakfast tables of the British public, that we should somehow be forcing them to accept a drug trade that they don't want was widely viewed as shameful. I mean, the only way that this war could be pushed through Parliament was by arguing that it had nothing to do with opium at all. And it was simply that these poor British merchants who had gone to China to pursue their trade

were in danger of being executed by this rabid Confucian official Lin Zishu. So for those who supported the war, it was a war of honor. It was a war of opening trade. It was a war of making China treat the British as equals, but most people knew that this was really about opium. Can we talk about the Treaty of Nanjing? Because that's where we've sort of come to in this. I mean, the treaty signed on August 29, 1842. And this is the first time we get to know this term, China's unequal treaties. Now, talk us through what is in this treaty, what do the Chinese have to swallow, and what do people think about it? As you said, this is the first of what are going to be called the unequal treaties, is the opening of a new era for China.

that's going to go on through the rest of the 19th century. This was China's first war with the Western power. They lost completely. And the British essentially were able to dictate the terms of the treaty at gunpoint. Among the terms for the British, they got Hong Kong. This was the taking of Hong Kong as a colony, and it's going to be in British hands until 1997 when they finally give it back to China. Ironically, at the time, Lord Palmerston wanted nothing to do with Hong Kong.

It was just sort of this watery island with barely any houses on it. could possibly find any profit there. So they got Hong Kong as an outright colony. They got the opening of five ports in China to British trade. These were called treaty ports. And they were cities where the British could reside. They could have warehouses. They could have their investments. They could go about their business. They could trade with any Chinese merchants they wanted to. And this really was the opening of trade that all of the merchants had wanted and that the British had wanted going all the way back to the 1760s. More than Lord McCartney would have dreamt of it is. Poor McCartney, yeah, sort of like supplicating himself and hoping for some kind of imperial favor.

Well, the British gunships win that for England in 1842. So they get the treaty ports. They get the Hong Kong colony. They get an indemnity, a war indemnity, to pay for the opium. And most ignominiously, and I guess this is sort of the case with war indemnities, China has to pay the cost of Britain having had to go to war to avenge its honor. So the victims have to pay for the war. Is this a catastrophic amount for the Chinese treasury?

It's a very large amount. It is not yet a catastrophic amount. And the thing about this treaty, the Treaty of Nanjing, is not catastrophic in its own right, but it's going to set a pattern for a series of wars through the 19th century where the indemnities get bigger and bigger and bigger until you have at the end of the 19th century a Chinese government where most of its revenue is going to paying off. in order to cover these indemnities to Britain or the United States or Japan. And is there anything at the Treaty of Nanjing that the British don't get? Do the Chinese hold the line on any articles that the British want? This is one of the most significant things about the Treaty of Nanjing. Here it is concluding

the opium, or at least a war that was very much understood in England as being about opium. And any historian looking at it can see that it was about opium. The one thing that this treaty does not do is legalize opium. And it's not that. that the British government wasn't interested in doing that, and they sort of, you know, tested out the idea. But mainly it just would have been too crass. That would be too crass. Sorry, in the treaty that gives 21 million silver dollars in reparation to drug smugglers, that is not crass. I mean, it's sort of beggars belief, really, doesn't it? It does. But if you go back to how the war was justified in the UK, that if the government was insisting all along that this has

nothing to do with the drug trade. If they then went around and legalized the drug trade, then all of the critics could say, yes, see, this is what we've been saying all along. I should say also that, you know, William Jardine, leading opium merchant, who had the ear of the government, he was back home at this point. We've been comparing him to a sort of Elon Musk figure. He's sitting in Palmerston's office. He hasn't brought his son along, but nor is he forced Palmerston to ride his car, but it's more or less similar sort of situation, isn't it? Yeah, the coziness. here. I mean, Jardine brings back the coastal maps that the smugglers have drawn up of the Chinese coast for sailing their smuggling ships and gives those to the British government to use in the

war because they don't have naval charts. So you and I share a character, Henry Pottinger, who is the understudy, much against his will to Alexander Burns in the first Afghan war. He runs the Intelligence Bureau in Gujarat and he has a rival called Wade who runs the Intelligence Bureau in Ludiana. They're like the two listening stations that the East India Company has on the edge of the Sikh and the Afghan empires. And Pottinger is permanently frustrated vis-a-vis the Afghans because it's Wade and Burns who get the glory such as it is of the conquest of Afghanistan. But Pottinger comes in and he's a guy that does the negotiation of the Treaty of Nanjin. Elliot's gets sort of sent back in disgrace. We never dealt with what happened to poor Elliot.

Well, I'll tell you what happened to Elliot. He promised $21 million worth. of reparations on behalf of the British government without asking them first. You know, in the treaty you said, you know, it would have been unseemly for them to legalise the drug trade. There are some really interesting things that happen. I mean, you know, the emperor as well, I mean, it's kind of a sad plaintiff crisis. It is true, I cannot prevent the introduction of this flowing poison, gain-seeking and corrupt men will for profit and sensuality to defeat my wishes, but nothing will induce me to

derive a revenue from the vice and misery of my people. There may well be a reluctance for, you know, Britain to declare itself in a huge narco economy, but also he doesn't want to do it either, because, you know, why would you want to do that to your people? He put a line in the sand. Commissioner Lynn was there to enforce it. He doesn't want to then say, actually, you know, I said drugs were terrible and they were wiping out our country. Now I think they're fine. So, so there is a bit of a face save on both sides here by not legalising drugs. Absolutely. And I should say that the last thing that Jardine wanted was the legalization of the opium trade. He makes more money if it's illegal, right? Yeah, they've invested so much in their fast clippers

for the coast. They've invested so much in developing personal relationships with the Chinese criminal guilds that buy and distribute the opium. Why would they want to give all of that up for a legalized trade that anyone who wanted to could get into? And also, if you legalize it, the Chinese can grow it. And you know, you don't want them to grow it. You want to import it. then you can fix the prices, you can fix the market. I mean, if you've sort of legalized it, then they have a stake in it. And it's all hideously clever. So it's not just that it's crass.

It's that Jardine hasn't pushed for it. I hadn't got that. That's some crucial perspective. Also in terms of the legalization. I mean, one of the wonderful things about Lin Zishu, you know, this impeccable moralist. There's that statue of him in New York City, Chinatown with a plaque that says pioneer of the war on drugs. He's the uncorruptible official who stood up to the opium trade.

his first advice to the Dao Guang emperor about opium, which was in 1833, he said, well, if the real problem is that all the silver is leaving the country through the illegal smuggling trade, the best solution for that is that the Chinese should grow a lot more opium themselves. And then they can buy it from each other and that we won't involve foreigners and so we can keep our wealth within the country. So obviously he changes that tune by the time of the opium war. Stephen, in the immediate aftermath of the Treaty of Nanjing, there seems to be some suggesting. from the government in India, that they will no longer have as much to do with opium. In June 1840, Lord Broughton writes to the Governor General Lord Auckland, saying that the government should consider restricting the cultivation of opium. After the monstrous outcry that has been raised against your wicked wish to poison a third

of the whole human race merely to fill your own coffers, that's quite a wrong letter. That's, yeah. That's the government that started this war, writing to the, Governor General in Calcutta. How does that not happen, though? Because what we instead see is the opium traders like Jardine and Matheson successfully establishing their fortunes, consolidating their riches, and then further pressure on the Chinese to grant more concessions as the century continues. I mean, the bottom line is that for all of the obvious moral arguments to be made about how insidious the drug trade is, you know, the British government has come to rely heavily on the

income from the tea trade, which is made possible by the liquidity provided by the opium trade. So the opium makes the tea trade possible. It bounces out the trade. And the tax that the British government is taking on the tea brought back to England is huge. The tariffs to use the word at the moment. I mean, back before the opium war, the British government had a 100% tariff on the tea on all of the tea coming back from China. And there were estimates that that was enough to float the entire Royal Navy worldwide. So the Indian government could not give up. on the revenue from this trade, it was just simply too profitable. But what's going to happen after the opium war is that the trade continues to expand and grow.

There's going to be a second opium war we could talk about, which actually will end with the legalization. Move us from that letter of Lord Broughton, what looks like the British government, realizing that it's completely unacceptable what's going on and trying to pressure the Indian government to cut back on opium to the run-up only nine years later to another opium war. Well, one of the effects of the Treaty of Nanjing and how it opens up other ports for British trade in China and the other foreigners are all going to get the same benefits. The Americans and the friends are going to pile right on in and get access to the same ports.

The key treaty port is going to be Shanghai, which is right where the Yangsa River meets the ocean. And all of that tea and silk and everything that the foreigners had been buying was being produced largely along the Yangsa River. It's much, much cheaper just to float it in a barge or a boat down to Shanghai to trade there. The whole reason that it was being carried overland down to Canton was because of an imperial decree that all the foreign trade had to go on there. So after the Treaty of Nanjing, after the Opium War, when Canton no longer has a monopoly, a huge amount of the foreign trade shifts up to Shanghai. This is going to cause, along with other factors, an economic collapse in South China. There's going to be hundreds of thousands of people out of work who had had menial labor somehow tied into the tea trade. Getting it to Canton before, that whole supply line is just wiped out overnight.

Yeah, people who carried boxes, people who pulled the ropes that pulled boats up river. So the immediate period after the opium war is going to be a time of dramatic economic decline in South China. partly because of the opium war itself, partly because of the movement of foreign trade, partly because of internal factors in the Qing dynasty. But it's out of that economic malaise in South China that the Taiping rebellion is going to emerge by the beginning of the 1850s. And this is going to be the largest civil war in human history. There's going to be 20 to 30 million people dead.

And it starts in South China, charges up to the center and then goes down and takes over the city of Nanjing, where the Treaty of Nanjing was signed. That's going to be the Taiping capital. And how fast, even, do you think it can be blamed on the way that the government's been humiliated and showed up by their failure in the first Opium War? That's a really good question. I can tell you who did think that it could be blamed on the British, which was the British government.

And ultimately, I mean, this is looking much further ahead. The British are going to remain neutral in the war between the Taiping and the Qing all the way up until about 1862. And when they break with neutrality and take the side of the side of the war. of the Qing dynasty, it's partly going to be based on a rationalization that this is their fault and that Britain had weakened the Qing government with the opium war and therefore they need to make up for that. The Marxist analysis of the Taiping Rebellion, the literal Marxist analysis, because Karl Marx was a reporter at the time and he reported on the Taiping Rebellion.

And his view was that the Taiping Rebellion was entirely Britain's fault. And as he wrote about it, He said, basically Britain cracked open this ancient sealed empire of China. And he said, you know, as when you crack open a sarcophagus and the mummy inside is exposed to the elements for the first time and it starts to decompose. He said, you know, the natural outcome of this is the breakdown of society in China. And when we're talking about the Taiping Rebellion is, if everyone knows what it is, can you just give us, you know, sort of the thumbnail sketch of the Taiping Rebellion causes of and how long did it last? Sure. The thumbnail sketch is that it begins with a Paca man. this is the Chinese minority in South China, who reads a Christian pamphlet that's been translated

into Chinese, has an epiphany that he's the son of God in the younger brother of Jesus Christ and leads a massive rebellion that begins from a religious sect and just sort of sweeps up a huge amount of the population. In this rebellion, it's going to go on until 1864, it finally ends. It starts in the 1850s. So it's going to lead to just a grueling civil war between the Qing dynasty, which is still based in Beijing, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, as they call it, which is based in Nanjing. And while all this is going on in China, just to give the wider picture to pull back the camera a little, the French, who've also got concessions in China now and have got treaty ports and factories outside of Canton, they're also realizing that this is an

extremely valuable part of the world to do business. They're realizing that opium is an important part of the trading pattern, and they're beginning to intervene in Indo-China. In 1847, they turn up in Dangan, allegedly to free Catholic missionaries. And this is the beginnings of the opening up of Southeast Asia to French colonialism. Absolutely. So, I mean, the reason to have the Taiping rebellion there is because that's going to provide the context within which the second opium war happens, which is that starting around in the late 1850s and going until 1860, the British, in alliance with the French, go to war against the Qing right in the middle of the Taiping rebellion. So it already weakened state?

Yeah, the Qing is just tottering. So while China is being shredded in all sorts of different ways, can we just have a look at the fortunes of one Jardine and one Matheson and let's throw in a Hugh Hamilton-Lindsay, who was so made in appearance? They're doing very well, thank you. So while China is being absolutely eviscerated from all these complicated things that are happening, they've all got themselves elected to Parliament. They're doing very well. They're very respectable, very wealthy man. And you've got Gigi Boy, who we also

talked about, is pouring his money, the Parsi, who was like the middleman in between, who is facilitating all this opium trade. He is unfathomably wealthy off the back of that. He's doing some good things. I mean, Parsi charities are his thing. So, you know, he's funding famine relief, schools, hospitals, public works. And by that, you know, sort of washes off that kind of smell of burning opium and becomes, again, thoroughly respectable. So these guys... The first Indian to become a British knight. Exactly. I forgot about that. He does become a British knight. So you've got, you know, these people who basically started a war for the right to sell

drugs to a country that didn't want them have got to the pinnacle of respectability, wealth and status in their fields. And Matheson, just again, to spell it out, and very simply, is now the second largest landowner in the entire United Kingdom. He's bought half of Scotland. God, when you're talking about these poor porters and everybody else and the whole of South China, collapsing because now Shanghai is the port, and on the other side, you've got these reprobates who are suddenly like rockets taking

up into the firmament. This is one of the wonderful ironies of the opium trade, that it's this salacious trade and trafficking and drugs and whatnot. But the individuals who are at the top of it are all viewed in their respective homes as being these extremely honorable, generous philanthropists. You have, like, Djibai in Bombay, founding hospitals and schools and things like that. You have Thomas Handis at Perkins in Massachusetts, who's helping to found the Massachusetts General Hospital in the Perkins School for the Blind.

And these people who make fantastic amounts of money in the opium trade view themselves as being these sort of gentlemanly benefactors. William Jardine writing in a letter to a correspondent that the opium trade is the most gentlemanly speculation I know of. Oh, please, really? And the same is true in China. The Chinese are involved in the trade are insisting it's a decent way of it earning a living.

But the opium kingpins in Fujian province are also viewed as sort of like pillars of the local society where they are. And, you know, there are instances where there's more loyalty to them than to the imperial government. But there must be. I mean, you've gone through source material

like nobody else has, okay. Is there ever a scintilla of rigour? regret in any of these people, the sort of narco kingpins, that actually what we done was not a good thing that we done at all, ever. Or did they think, but don't care. Don't care. Don't care. Don't care. Don't care. None comes to mind. Certainly not from Jardine and Matheson. And I should say, in contrast to Jadjiboy in Bombay or Thomas Anderson Perkins in Massachusetts, to my knowledge, Jardine and Matheson and Matheson and Matheson in Perkins in Massachusetts, to my knowledge, to my knowledge. To my knowledge, to my knowledge. To my knowledge. nothing comes to mind of them in late life on their deathbed looking back and saying, yeah, I would be happier to go and meet my God if I had done a little better in my life. That's right. If I hadn't sort of got an entire continent hooked on opium and also destroyed an economy. Look, we're going to take a break here.

Join us after the break where we plunge into the second opium war. So we ended the last half with Jardine and Matheson becoming the second largest. landowners of the United Kingdom. Ossholes that they are, can I just say? But you might have thought that having defeated China once and extracted the treaty ports that they were after, that the British were now going to leave China alone in terms of sort of gunships and warfare and just continue to make money from the ports they've opened up.

But within 15 years, a second war is declared. And this time it's not just Britain, but it's Britain and France together. Tell us about the arrow and how that kicks it off. The grounds of the first opium war were ignominious. The grounds of the second opium war are just absurd. The reason for the war is because the British merchants in China were not getting as rich as they had hoped from the opening of the five treaty ports from the Treaty of Nanjing. And also the Cantonese didn't want to let them into the city. Canton was supposed to be open, but the Cantonese hated them.

The basic pretext for the war is that there was, a Chinese smuggling vessel with a Chinese captain and a Chinese crew that had paid for the right to fly the Union Jack because that would make it immune to being searched by Chinese forces. I should say like one of the other terms of the Treaty of Nanjing was extraterritoriality that the British were only subject to British law when they were in China. So this was a Chinese smuggling ship, Chinese captain, Chinese crew, flying the British flag to protect itself. It was boarded by Qing agents.

They arrested the captain and crew. And in the course of arresting them, somebody took down the British flag. The taking down of the British flag was taken as a sufficient insult to start another war. That was it. That was it. But it was the insult of a Qing official taking down the British flag that had been flying on the boat. Are we to suppose then that they were just looking for an excuse to cement the destruction? It could have been anything.

It could have been that. It could have been looking at a chicken funny in the marketplace. I mean, it could have been anything. Really. Exactly. And it's going to go through the same sort of explosion of controversy back in England. How can we be fighting a war on the basis of this? And in the case of the second opium war, you know, there's going to be a point where they dissolve parliament and hold new elections to try to disenfranchise the lawmakers who opposed this war. But it goes forward. And so Britain and France as allies, they go and they invade Kenton and then they go up to the north. It's extended back and forth, but it's all going to end. 1860 with the British and French forces invading Beijing, driving the Emperor into hiding into Manchuria, where he's going to die the following year, never coming back to his throne. And then the Emperor's Summer Palace, which was about 800 acres of beautiful grounds and

priceless buildings, the French are going to loot it, and then the British are going to burn it to the ground. Tell us about this, because this is sometimes sort of held to be almost the kind of burning of the Library of Alexandria. It's a massive war crime against an incredibly beautiful work of art. Absolutely. I mean, Victor Hugo described the British and French as these bandits rampaging in China and destroying one of the great wonders of the world. The site of the Summer Palace is a major nationalist site right now in China. If you go there, there are signs saying the Summer Palace was the delight of the Chinese people until the imperialist British and French came and destroyed it in the Second Opium War. The reality of the Imperial Summer Palace was that it was the Imperial Summer Palace. This is where the Emperor lived with his family and his concubines and all their stuff. servants and things like that, and ordinary Chinese people could not go in there.

I'm with the ordinary Chinese people. I want to know what it looked like where I wouldn't have been able to visit. Like the forbidden city, courtyard after courtyard of wooden houses. No, the forbidden city was cold and uncomfortable and sterile. The Imperial Summer Palace was pictured as like a massively expansive, beautiful park with water features and forests and little mountains that had been recreated and all kinds of different Pogododas. buildings, there were European-style buildings. Actually, as a symbol of imperialism in China, I mean, the only parts of the summer palace that remain are these marble buildings that were built by Jesuit missionaries who served at the Qing court. And because they were made out of marble,

they survived. So the ruins are still there for all the tourists to go and see and take their pictures with. But it's a sort of wonderful circularity because these buildings signify, first of all, that foreigners used to come in order to serve China. And then they came as the oppressors and conquerors. What did it have looked a bit like Jeholl or Chengde or any of the other summer palaces, that kind of thing, gorgeous lakes, woods? Yeah, they tried to recreate scenery from other parts of the empire. It was really a world of its own. And the Xienfong emperor, who was the emperor at the time, he had grown up there and he almost never left it. He hated being in the forbidden city. This was sort of his luxurious world that was just for him. And the guy responsible for burning it down is what the grandson of the Lord Elgin who strips the Parthen of the Parthen Marples.

Isn't it the same family? Such a glorious family. Yes. Yeah. So the son of the man who took the Parthen on Marbles, he's the one who burns down the summer palace. I used to go dancing with that family. I remember the Bruce's very well. I grew up in Scotland.

Can I just say, of course you did. You know, in America, you have these sort of boards which say, you know, three days without any kind of incident, no death. We don't get through one of these pods. I want a longing upon one pod without a mention of William's family or disreputable connections with other families. I don't related to this, Lop, but I used to dance with them. I remember he's do Scottish Reels with Georgina Bruce. It's like zero generations without imperial atrocity. It's not even generations, Stephen.

It's every blooming podcast. Okay. I can defend Elgin for a moment, though. Go on then. Have a go. On behalf of my old dancing partners, please put up the counter argument. Try. In his defense, and nobody wanted to hear this when he got back to England.

Like, he was an absolute pariah. But the burning of the summer palace was ostensibly a reaction to the Qing having kidnapped and killed a group of diplomatic interpreters. So according to Elgin at the time, he said that his officers wanted to burn Beijing to the ground. So they restrain themselves and just at the summer palace, okay. Contra to the sign that's at the summer palace today saying this was the delight of the Chinese people, Elgin claimed that he destroyed the summer palace because that was the only way to punish the emperor of China without harming the people. Oh, I mean, you know, there's a point in there somewhere, I guess.

How many of the diplomats were killed? It was a small handful and a couple of their guards from India. Right. But tell us, Stephen, the treaty that follows here. So just as we had the treaty at the end of the first Opium War giving over Hong Kong, what is the Convention of Peking and the Treaty of Tiencine? What has given over in this next slicing up of Chinese rights? Essentially more treaty ports.

And this was sort of the vision of the British in their wars. Well, we haven't gotten rich yet. Now we can get some ports further up north. We can get some ports up the Yangtze River. So the main terms of that were opening China further to British trade. And sort of quietly on the side, Lord Elgin signs a convention that legalizes opium. So it's the second Opium War that finally legalizes opium. So how is it suddenly a good idea to legalize opium? I thought everybody was a ginnit. Everybody on every side was saying, we'll make more money if it remains illegal. Certainly Jardina Matheson, who seemed to have the ear of anybody who's important, have wanted it to remain illegal. The emperor wanted it to remain illegal. What is the pro here of suddenly legalizing it all?

And this is quite a ways after the first opium war. And the first opium war really was about opium. And that's the main thing that restrained, I think, the British government from just asking that this product be legalized because they needed this to be trafficked in China. With the second opium war, the legalization, it's not the central reason for fighting the war. It almost comes as an afterthought because it's sort of de facto legal by this time. And this really just formalizes a constantly growing trade. legalizing opium, does it lead to more addiction or less addiction? It absolutely leads to more addiction.

That there is more opium being trafficked. It's going to be more opium grown in China. The trade is going to keep growing and growing. The British are eventually just going to get shut out of the trade, and it's going to be primarily in the hands of natives from India and China. So in a sense, Jardine and Matheson were right, that it was better to keep it. By the 1870s, Jardine and Matheson have to pull out of the opium trade because there isn't any profit to be made in it anymore.

How interesting, because the Chinese are growing it quicker and just doing deals with the policies. Absolutely. And by the time you get to the 20th century, most of the opium is being grown in China. This is the thing about the opium war that in the original opium war, at that time, opium was still a very expensive luxury product in China. It was not widely used in the sense of peasants smoking opium and falling asleep on the ground. It was used by people who had the money to buy it, which was a much smaller part of the population. By the time you get to the 20th century, 80 or 90% of the opium being used in China is being grown in China, and it's so cheap that it does spread through the entire society.

I mean, it's crisis after crisis after crisis and then humiliation. What are people saying at the time about, you know, what lessons they are learning from this entire experience? Julia Lovell writes about this in her book on the Opium War, that this war was not called the Opium War in Chinese until now. nationalist historians in the 1920s picked it up as sort of the foundation of national humiliation, etc. During the Qing dynasty, this was just considered sort of a border scrimish. It had nothing to compare to the war against the Taipei or the wars in Central Asia. But as far as what the legalization means for the government is that when it's legalized, the Chinese government

establishes this very lucrative transit tax on opium shipments within China, which the Qing government comes to rely on. And after the Qing government is overthrown in 1912, the Republican government comes to rely heavily on this. And actually all the way through World War II, the KMT is relying heavily on opium revenue to help fund its military. The communists, who are the ones who are eventually going to eradicate it, during World War II, when they're at Yanon, they too are using these opium transit taxes to help fund their military. It becomes really sort of fundamental to government revenue within China until it's finally suppressed in the 1950s. And this seems to be a story that's repeating itself over and over again in the course of this

series, that everyone says it's a bad thing, it should stop. But the economic imperative, whether it's the India company needing to produce it to pay their bills in India, whether it's the Chinese transit taxes at the time, the KMT, everyone benefits except the poor consumer. And the figures are that by the early decades of the 20th century, between 3 and 10% of Chinese population, many of 50 million people are using opium. So it's benefiting the government, but the people are massively addicted. Massively addicted, generationally impoverished. The figure is 200 million people. 200 million. Okay. So at what point does China start referring to this, as they do now, to the hundred years of humiliation. I mean, at what point does that word humiliation start coming in

the Chinese vocabulary? In the 20th century, it does. So Chen Kai Sheck, at the top of his diary entries, right? So never forget national humiliation. Never forget national humiliation. It's central to the nationalist. I mean, one of the major projects of 20th century China was trying to unify the Chinese people and make them think of themselves as a nation. And the idea of the humiliation of China at the hands of imperial powers in the 19th century is going to be foundational to that. When you think about this, you know, the idea of humiliation, that's not a domestic issue. You are humiliated in the eyes of someone else. You are humiliated in the eyes of other countries. And so in teaching the people of China to care about China as their family

and their home, and that that entity has been humiliated in the eyes of the British and the French and the Americans and the Japanese. It's a binding force. Because if you go back to the opium war at the time, nobody's paying attention to what the imperial government wants. Nobody really sees this as a shame because they're not invested in whether the imperial government succeeds or not. Yeah, I mean, they're just aliens.

They're somewhere else. They're in cities we can't visit and palaces that we don't get to see. Yeah, the people are subjects of the emperor. They are not citizens. You know, his power does not come from them. So when the communists start talking about humiliation and saying, this is what happens, I mean, to what level is it,

I don't want to say indoctrinated. Well, maybe indoctrinated. I mean, our history books rewritten, our schoolchildren drilled in this. I mean, at what point does this start becoming something that we can understand in the psyche of maybe China today? When the Chinese talk about never again, this is what they're referring to. At what point does that start becoming inculcated in Chinese thinking? Well, in terms of the communists in China, you know, who came to power in 1949, it's really during the Korean War in the early 1950s that the communists go all in on suppressing opium within China. And when they do, the campaign, it's cast as a patriotic campaign.

So this is in the midst of the war in Korea, which was in China, it was described as the war to aid Korea and resist America. And the anti-opium campaigns were cast as help Korea resist America, suppress opium. And they cast opium as the way, that foreigners had oppressed the Chinese. And it's really in that view where you look back and you see, aha, China was never colonized per se by the British. The British took ports. It was sort of semi-colonial, but most of China was under the control of the Qing Empire and then the Republican government. So it wasn't directly colonized the way that India had been. But if you look at

it through the lens of opium, you can come out with a view that the Chinese were absolutely enslaved by British opium and sort of made weak and kept under the thumb of imperialists. You said, you know, actually China was never colonized. In all this humiliation, it wasn't colonized the way India was colonized. It was an economic invasion, if you like. Why wasn't it colonized? What was it about China that meant that actually the British didn't want to colonize it? The tipping point really came during the Taiping Rebellion. right after the second opium war. So in 1860, the British had just fought two opium wars against the Qing government. They had destabilized it. Members of government realized that they

had done a great deal to destabilize the government of China. They thought that, in fact, China might collapse. Here's where India comes back into the picture, that this is just after the mutiny in India, and this is just after the British government has sort of taken control over India from the East India Company. And at this point in time, the very last thing that anyone in the British government wants to do is to colonize China. But they are concerned that if China collapses, like if the Qing dynasty collapses and China sinks into anarchy, that the French will colonize China to the exclusion

of British trade. And so therefore, in order to prevent the possibility of France invading China and colonizing it. The British now take on what they see is a vested interest in keeping the Qing dynasty alive. So they're propping up the emperor that they've sort of almost destroyed. That's so interesting. How far is it in the language today of Xi Jinping? How far are they still talking about the century of humiliation? How far is it driving China in its reaction to the West? I mean, this week Trump tried to impose tariffs, China, try to resist and realizing that it may also be a moment of opportunity. How does this play into all that? Well, this country. Well, this country,

up when you talk about trade issues with China on things like fentanyl, you know, drug issues. I mean, China's position on that is, you know, we suffered the opium war. We are the last government that is ever going to be supportive of a drug trade. You know, we are the most anti-drug government there is on earth. But at the same time, I think, you know, the Chinese government has a little bit of the attitude that the British did prior to the opium war, which is that, you know, people would appeal to the British government saying we should stop this trade and the British government would say, well, it's not our job to enforce China's laws for it. And if the Chinese didn't buy

this, then none of the British would be selling it to them. Just to be clear, the Chinese are making a large amount of fentanyl. I mean, it's a sort of like, I mean, there's a symmetry to this. I just wanted to clarify completely. You know, the Chinese manufacture fentanyl. Fentanyl is the blight of American lives. And what you're saying is the Chinese are saying, it's not us, governor. I mean, we're just making this stuff. It's up to them if they want to buy it, which is incredibly mimics what Jardine Matheson et al we're saying about opium. We're not making them take it. I mean, to essentially throw up your hands and say that the United States is unable to police the fentanyl trade. We're unable to prevent our population from using this drug. Therefore,

it's the fault of everybody else. That's what Trump is doing at the moment. The justification for all the tariffs that he's instituting right now are the emergency caused by fentanyl. So in a certain way, he's invoking a kind of victimhood, that America is the victim of foreigners are allowing fentanyl into our country. Bloody how, is this all just so similar. Nothing changes. It's all, we just go through it again and again and again. I don't think the current moment will end with the PLA Navy invading California to protect

Chinese fentanyl dealer. So it's not going to go to that far of a parallel. But you can say that the areas of America where fentanyl ran most rampant is magacetral, isn't it? It is the poor, blue-collar declining areas of America. And the sense that the Chinese had of a people's being humiliated and having lost their place in the world, these are the people who are turning to opium. Is that too simplistic or not? I mean, the drug trade feeds on misery. And those who profit from it are the ones who profit from the misery of others. That's really the bottom line, and that's the consistent thread through all of this. In Amatav Ghosh's,

wonderful book, Smok and Ashes, he draws another parallel between the Chinese soul-searching after the humiliations of the Opium War and the rise of Maga and Trump. He talks about the way that the sense of a people's loss of their place in the world, the way that the Chinese feel that after their twin defeats in the two opium wars, is similar to the sense of America losing its power, which has, in some ways, the engine behind the rise of Trump, this idea, that you need to make America great again because it's in decline. It's no longer this central power as it was in the 20th century. And in both areas, we have these opioid crises taking root in the areas which are most humiliated, which are poorest.

Is that a parallel you would endorse? Absolutely. I mean, in both cases, the opioid crisis represents a lack of control over one's own population. The inability to enforce laws, the inability to suppress an illegal traffic with, your country. And in both cases, there's sort of a turning outward to blame that on outsiders. It can't be our fault. It must be the fault of the others who are forcing this on us. And there's that nostalgia there. I mean, for trumpets, the U.S. is still unquestionably central in the world, but he likes to sort of pretend that we've been weakened and we've fallen from

where we were in the past. I think today, the way that the opium war gets used by the Chinese government, really about the year 2000 or so, Chinese diplomats backed off from using the century of humiliation as the centerpiece of how China presented itself to the world, largely because they were becoming powerful enough by them, that the threat of a military powerhouse with a chip on its shoulder because of past insults and humiliations was something that seemed dangerous to the world. So instead, they talked about China's peaceful rise and how we're all going to get along together. Stephen, it has been such a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for coming on. Stephen R. Platt, I cannot, cannot, cannot praise his book highly.

enough. Imperial Twilight is the one that we're all raving about. There is a new book which I can't wait to get my grubby little hands on and that is the untold story of a renegade Marine. It's called The Raider and it is out on May the 13th, so we're recording that just before that. And we have a new series to tell you about it. Well, yes, I mean, we take turns in scratching our itches, if I can put it that way. Very elegantly put to this. Thank you for that. I know. I'm a woman of elegant words. But the thing is, a lot of the things that we've talked. about in this episode, particularly about how China sees itself. There are three major countries which, referring to their dispossession or their past, are reinventing themselves and their spheres of influence stroke territorial gains. So China is one right now, you know, which is talking about sort of territorial gains. It's alarming the world with some of its naval movements right now, right here and now. You've got Russia on the move. I mean, Ukraine just one part of its growing sphere of influence. And of course, you've got America saying,

you know what? We'll turn Gaza into a Mediterranean casino. We'll take the Panama Canal. We'll take Canada while we're at it. In Greenland, you can jump on board as well. So what I wanted to do was look at the last time somebody took a Sharpie to a map of the world and started drawing bigger circles around their countries. And the thing that came to mind was Yalta, the Yalta conference after World War II. So I want to take a... back to that moment when the war is about to be won, the defeat of the Nazis is guaranteed, but the peace is uncertain. And these three giants come together at Yalta. So you've got the Russians, you've got the British, and you've got the Americans, and they are looking at a

world map like it's a game of risk, and they're deciding who gets what. So that's what I wanted to look at and maybe look at some of the parallels. It's an interesting story, fascinating me. So that'll be our next thing. That's what we're going to be doing next. Thank you very much. Well, that's all for us this time. Goodbye from me, William Duremple. And it's goodbye from me, Anita Aram.