The Opium War

The Opium Trade in China between the British and the Chinese was the very first drug war of the 19th century and provoked a great war. It was called the Opium War Opium is a preparation made from the juice of poppy seedpods and used to produce heroin.The drug was mainly produced in and shipped from the East Indies to China by British merchants. This addictive drug had gotten many Chinese badly hooked by the early 1800s, this highly addictive drug led china to fall money wise and its army began to collapse.

This made tax collectors charge more and more to local villages and made the people poorer and poorer. These drugs used got the chinese mad and they stopped trading for opium, this raged the british and they declared war on the chinese. The british used their industrialized weapons to fight the chinese, these battles went on for three years. Finally the chinese people were defeated easily because of the more advanced technology that the British hold due to their industrialization of the industrial revolution.They made china sign a treaty that enabled china to give the British trade and obligated china to open trading ports.