In fact, it wasn’t one war, but two – both fought in 19th century China. In these conflicts, Great Britain and France allied themselves to force China to allow the sale of opium, an anesthetic drug extracted from the poppy, in its territory. For the British and French, exporting opium to China was a way of making up for the loss in trade relations with the Chinese, who sold much more valued goods to the West, such as tea, porcelain and silk. But the Beijing government did not look favorably on bartering: from the 18th century onwards, drug consumption exploded in the country, causing serious social problems – not even an imperial decree of 1796 was able to stop the expansion of the problem.
The thing caught fire for good in 1839, when the Chinese government destroyed an amount of opium that was in the hands of British merchants equivalent to a year’s consumption. The British government reacted by sending warships and soldiers to the East, triggering the first Opium War. Better equipped, the British troops overcame the Chinese in 1842, forcing them to sign a treaty opening the ports and compensating for the destroyed opium – but the drug trade was still prohibited.
Business got complicated again in 1856, when Chinese authorities searched a British ship for contraband opium. It was the excuse that Great Britain needed to declare the Second Opium War, won again by the Westerners in 1857. As a price for defeat, China had to swallow the legalization of the importation of opium into the country for a long time: the use and drug trade in Chinese territory were only banned once and for all after the Communists took power in 1949.
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craft opium
Extracted from the poppy, drug also gives rise to morphine and heroin
1. Opium is a drug extracted from a specific type of poppy, Papaver somniferum. The place with the highest concentration of its active principle is the capsule that houses the seeds of the plant and from which the flower comes out.
2. After the petals of the flower have fallen, the cultivators scratch the surface of the capsule with a small knife, producing vertical cuts of small depth, through which a milky and whitish liquid oozes.
3. This sap is then exposed to the sun – generally, overnight. With heat, the liquid changes color and consistency, turning into a sticky brownish mass, similar to earwax. It’s called raw opium
4. Generally, the drug is consumed in induction-heated pipes – the direct flame destroys the components responsible for the drug’s numbing effect. Other times, raw opium is dried and ground into a powder for storage and sale.
5. Through chemical processes, raw opium can be processed to manufacture other drugs such as codeine (used today as a local anesthetic by doctors and dentists), morphine and heroin