While synthetic opiods are a relatively new class of drugs, opium has a long destructive history in trade wars and warfare, ...

Opium was grown in British India, and smuggled into China. The Chinese resisted the opium trade. This led to war, after the Chinese destroyed all the British opium in China. The Chinese army and ...

Selling opium in China was banned ... The First Opium War lasted from 1839 to 1842. The British Royal Navy had much better guns and easily defeated the Qing armies. In the aftermath, the Treaty ...

From Ssuyu Teng and John Fairbank, China's Response to the West (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), reprinted in Mark A. Kishlansky, ed., Sources of World History, Volume II, (New York: ...