Britain got China addicted to opium, and when China tried to stop it, Britain went to war to keep se

Britain got China addicted to opium, and when China tried to stop it, Britain went to war to keep selling.

In the 19th century, British merchants flooded China with opium grown in British-ruled Bengal. By the late 1830s millions of Chinese were addicted, and China's silver was flowing out to pay for the drug.

In 1839, Chinese commissioner Lin Zexu seized and destroyed more than 20,000 chests of British opium in Canton. London answered with gunboats.

China lost the First Opium War. Under the 1842 Treaty of Nanking it paid Britain 21 million silver dollars, opened five ports to British trade and handed over Hong Kong. After the Second Opium War, the opium trade was made legal.

By 1906, an imperial edict admitted that three or four out of every ten Chinese were smoking it.

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