Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)(cyber.harvard.edu) |
Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)(cyber.harvard.edu) |
>Suppose there were people from another country who carried opium for sale to England and seduced your people into buying and smoking it; certainly your honorable ruler would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused. We have heard heretofore that your honorable ruler is kind and benevolent.
>We have further learned that in London, the capital of your honorable rule, and in Scotland, Ireland, and other places, originally no opium has been produced. Only in several places of India under your control such as Bengal, Madras, Bombay, Patna, Benares, and Malwa has opium been planted from hill to hill, and ponds have been opened for its manufacture. For months and years work is continued in order to accumulate the poison. The obnoxious odor ascends, irritating heaven and frightening the spirits. Indeed you, O King, can eradicate the opium plant in these places, hoe over the fields entirely, and sow in its stead the five grains [millet, barley, wheat, etc.]. Anyone who dares again attempt to plant and manufacture opium should be severely punished. This will really be a great, benevolent government policy that will increase the common weal and get rid of evil. For this, Heaven must support you and the spirits must bring you good fortune, prolonging your old age and extending your descendants. All will depend on this act.
Reading this was pretty sad. So many vain appeals to reason. "We know you know it's bad for you, you've banned it yourself, please stop dumping it on us." Unfortunately the people he wrote that letter to didnt see them as equals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War#Reaction_in_Br...
A lot of the complaints voiced by the pro-war people ironically hinge on feeling slighted by the imperial court and that the Qing "didnt see them as equals"
Did that letter suggest the British were seen as equals? The phrase "barbarian" is used 16 times in the text...
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"The kings of your honorable country by a tradition handed down from generation to generation have always been noted for their politeness and submissiveness."
"Privately we are delighted with the way in which the honorable rulers of your country deeply understand the grand principles and are grateful for the Celestial grace."
"This is the source from which your country has become known for its wealth."
"Since it is not permitted to do harm to your own country, then even less should you let it be passed on to the harm of other countries -- how much less to China!"
"We take into to consideration, however, the fact that the various barbarians have still known how to repent their crimes and return to their allegiance to us"
"Take tea and rhubarb, for example; the foreign countries cannot get along for a single day without them. If China cuts off these benefits with no sympathy for those who are to suffer, then what can the barbarians rely upon to keep themselves alive? Moreover the woolens, camlets, and longells [i.e., textiles] of foreign countries cannot be woven unless they obtain Chinese silk. If China, again, cuts off this beneficial export, what profit can the barbarians expect to make?"
"Our Celestial Dynasty rules over and supervises the myriad states, and surely possesses unfathomable spiritual dignity."
"May you, O King, check your wicked and sift your wicked people before they come to China, in order to guarantee the peace of your nation, to show further the sincerity of your politeness and submissiveness"
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The constant, repeated subtext is that Britain is merely a far flung tributary nation of China. Lin states outright that all Britains wealth is derived from from China and needs Chinese good just to survive.
The Imperial Qinq court was completely delusional.
No. Chinese emperors saw every other state outside the Celestial Empire as a tributary state and expected a full submission to the Chinese emperor, hence the language.
> The phrase "barbarian" is used 16 times in the text
«Barbarian» (蠻夷) was a term to refer to anyone else other than a direct subject of the Chinese Empire. Only the Chinese people were considered to be civilised, everyone else outside the Celestial Empire was not. As the opium wars progressed, one of the clauses in the follow-up treaty of Tianjin was forbidding the Chinese from the use of the 夷 character (meaning «a barbarian») to refer to the Westerners.
The word for «barbarian», 野蠻人 / 蠻夷 are still occasionally used as an insult between some Northern and Southern Chinese to refer to each other (as some Southern Chinese consider themselves to have descended from the true Tang Han Chinese and consider the Northerners to be bastard children of Mongolians, Manchu and the Han Chinese whereas some Northern Chinese consider the Southern Chinese to have descended from barbarian tribes, or Baiyue (百越) – the human history gets unpleasantly messy at times). Or as a pejorative to refer to Westerners, although mostly in the domestic nationalistic narrative.
> The constant, repeated subtext is that Britain is merely a far flung tributary nation of China […] The Imperial Qinq court was completely delusional.
Very much. In the historical context, the First Opium War was a disaster that had been waiting to happen and the British happened to be the trigger. The Daoguang Emperor was an exceptionally backward individual who flatly refused to grasp the understanding that the world had changed and self-imposed Chinese isolationist policies could not longer work, and that the Celestial Empire had fallen behind the progress. Most of his successors were just as myopic and delusional.
Are you trying to suggest that the phrase is inaccurate? If so, what justifications do you present?
That’s the history of the church and king much from 800AD. At its peak, the British stole 200+ trillion wealth rom India and its other colonies.
The Chinese did indeed start a crackdown on opium trade after this, including sending troops to seize warehouses full of it. This action sparked off the first Opium War with Britian, and kicking off the so-called Chinese “Century of Humiliation”.
...aeons ago, mixing up cue and queue would have been considered an eggcorn. [0] Nowadays, however, "queue" is perfectly cromulent to use in this idiom: the first Opium War has been added to the end of the playlist, and will soon commence.
However, I think I'll chalk my use of "queue" rather than "cue" to it being 1 AM when I wrote the comment. :)
Whether that state was totally nice or democratic or "Chinese" or whatever value you cherish, is besides the point. It does not legitimize any of what GB did during either Opium War, and therefore I disagree that it's "important to stress".
“n the leafy town of Taiyu, Shanxi, an inland Chinese province southwest of Beijing, the district magistrate Chen Lihe had a stele put up for public display. The date was 1817 and, four years earlier, the emperor had issued a raft of regulations against opium, including severe punishments for handling, selling or consuming it. The stele read: Opium is produced beyond the seas, but its poison flows into China. Those who buy it and consume it break their families, harm their own lives, and violate the law. Treachery, licentiousness, robbery, and brigandage all arise from it. Both the young and vigorous and the old and weak die from it. Wealthy and luxurious houses are impoverished by it. Brave and bright sons and younger brothers are made stupid and unfilial by it. People who dwell in peace in their houses well stocked with delicacies feel the heavy blows of the bamboo and the weight of the cangue because of it; they also suffer strangulation, exile, and banishment at the hands of the law because of it. As for its injurious effect on custom, opium destroys the five natural relationships, and its harmful effect on individual character is even more unspeakable."
But deploying Royal Navy to acquire foreign territory for trade is the "war".
Singapore executes disabled Malaysian convicted in drug case https://www.npr.org/2022/04/27/1094965375/singapore-executes...
I'm curious where the idea that rhubarb was a major dependency came from. Or indeed the idea that it was a Chinese monopoly; it was grown in Europe in this era.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/First...
China solved their drug problem. Ours is spinning out of control.
For comparison: There were 3,449 gun related deaths reported in the same year: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...
* edited to clarify that gun deaths were from all cause, not just homicide
Just like modern China (and Mexico) should be considered deeply responsible for the current massive opioid crisis in the United States: 1. https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-... 2. https://www.science.org/content/article/underground-labs-chi... 3. https://www.npr.org/2020/11/17/916890880/we-are-shipping-to-... 4. https://www.brookings.edu/research/china-and-synthetic-drugs...
And the other way round: For sure, Opium was imported to England. Why didn't it become a problem?
Opium was produced around Calcutta(Kolkata). Shipping it to China was cheap, shipping it to the UK was expensive. Only the wealthy British could afford opium, and they used a ton of it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_English_Opiu...
The drugs that China exports to the US aren't legal to be sold in China, but are legal (for them) to export to other countries.
Opium was produced in British India, not China, for the most part.
10X the population, you'll see anything worked before becomes useless.
So one problem in UK is nusaise, in China would be catastrophe.
Just because Opium is not a problem in UK, doesn't mean that it would be a problem in China.
Also, liberal voting politics works in the West, could be a disaster in the majority of the world today outside of the West.
is it China and Mexico who are behind the narrative that the war on drugs is immoral and unnecessary and that we'd better just legalize everything?
https://blog.gale.com/the-george-macartney-mission-to-china-...
Fentanyl is an opioid, albeit a synthetic one. The CDC numbers don't break down the percentages of which drug killed the most people. The California site that you cited does, but the 5,502 number you cite is "Deaths Related to Any Opioid Overdose", which includes Fentanyl. So according to the link you cited, nearly 72% of all opioid deaths (in California) were caused by Fentanyl. The California firearm death count you cite is still lower than California's Fentanyl death rate for the same period. Extrapolating for the whole country using California's Fentanyl/Opioid ratio yields an approximate US Fentanyl death count of 65,838 for 2020.
https://www.dea.gov/factsheets/fentanyl
"Rates of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone, which includes fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, increased over 56% from 2019 to 2020. The number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids in 2020 was more than 18 times the number in 2013. More than 56,000 people died from overdoses involving synthetic opioids in 2020. The latest provisional drug overdose death counts through June 2021 suggest an acceleration of overdose deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic."
They did indeed have weapons the Chinese (and other nations) wanted, but only sold a limited amount of them, to avoid arming the other nations too well, in case they ever wanted to go conquering.
Traditionally, in history and now, you sell your best military tech to your strongest allies, and not to random countries.
It was difficult to sell into China because import was monopolized by a few Chinese firms and geographically restricted.
To say that preindustrial China wouldn't benefit from good produced in industrialized Britian or America is highly suspect and defies common sense.
The issue is that when you present goods like mass produced clay teapots, cotton textiles, etc to the customs agents of the country which invented fine china, and silk, you're not going to impress them.
And yes, Britain coveted China. As did Japan, Russia, Germany, The United States, France, Italy, and Austria-Hungary. Even after they won the opium wars and got their favorable trades, they continued to work to overthrow or minimize the Qing dynasty and take political power. The Qing ended up sputtering out a few years before it became unfashionable to be a colonialist, so China dissolved into rule by warlords, then conquered by Japan, then the communists won and the rest is history.
A good response to that would be, "yeah, but it was for the Chinese to make their minds up about that, not the British!"
And a good response to that might be: "when you say the Chinese made their minds up, are you talking about a democratic process?"
It was the early 19th century. You could count the number of democratic countries on one hand. (If you counted countries where only men could vote)
For example, 夷 (the main character compounding the word 蠻夷, a «barbarian») – on its own – means «wild» or «ferral»; it can also be used to refer to a massacre (夷族 or 夷戮), but it can also be used to mean «calm», as in 夷然 (a fringe written word).
Most translations to European languages have historically used approximations due to the lack of the comprehension of a culture unfamiliar to Europeans. Therefore, the Greek word for «barbaric» / «barbarian» has been used as the closest appoximation of the meaning of 夷, but not it does not equate to its true semantic meaning for a native speaker.
In the text being referenced further down the thread the following words are used:
眾夷 – crowd(s) of barbarians
夷人 – barbarian(s), literally «barbarian person(s)»
夷船 – barbarian ships
外夷 – foreign barbarians
夷 – barbarian(s)
奸夷 – wicked / evil barbarians
國夷 – barbarian countries/states, literally «country/-ies of barbarians».
Curiously, in Viet Nam, being written as 越南, the 越 refers to Baiyue or «one hundred yue (tribes)» (百越 that had formed an ancient Yue Kingdom and were considered barbarians at the time). And therefore 越 has had pretty strong barbaric connotations in the historical context for a long time. The actual name of the Viet Nam is, in fact, Nam Viet 南越, but words had to be swapped around at the behest of the Jiaqing Emperor of Qing to conform with the Classical Chinese grammar.
Tens of millions of Chinese died during the Manchu invasion of China. The Qing forced every Han Chinese male to shave their forehead and wear a queue on the threat of death, but that's apparently not humiliating.
When the Mongols and Manchu conquered the Chinese "Crown" it was more of a change of dynasty and they they effectively became Chinese. Mongolia was part of the Chinese empire until its fall in 1912, for instance.
Quotes from the PDF "What is at issue is not the magnitude of Qing achievement, but Ho's statement that "the key to its [Qing] success was the adoption by early Manchu rulers of a policy of systematic sinicization". The new scholarship suggests just the opposite: the key to Qing success, at least in terms of empire-building, lay in its ability to use its cultural links with the non-Han peoples of Inner Asia and to differentiate the administration of the non-Han regions from the administration of the former Ming provinces."
""Sinicization" -- the thesis that all of the non-Han peoples who have entered the Chinese realm have eventually been assimilated into Chinese culture -- is a twentieth century Han nationalist interpretation of China's past."
But in England and the West in general, China found an adversary that could defeat them militarily, and which had no interest in adopting their culture or civilization. Quite the contrary, the new foreign invaders were disrepectful of Chinese culture in a way that was new and shocking.