owed, the pirates' superior weapons defeated all the forces sent against them, and the Empire was forced to accede to their demand for toleration of the drug trade.
It happens that the rejected princeling and the pirate queen were rulers of the same barbarian country. The first was King George III; the second was Queen Victoria. The Opium Wars, in which British merchants won the right to import opium into China, were an early stage in a succession of European encroachments into China. By extraordinary coincidence, Sir Thomas Staunton, who as a boy of twelve had been the only member of the English embassage in Qianlong's reign who had learned Chinese, would, as the Englishman most knowledgeable about China, give a decisive speech in Parliament in favor of launching the Opium War.
In the decades that followed, these encroachments expanded. China was forcibly compelled to accept the establishment of a five "Treaty Ports," Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai. Large permanent foreign settlements were established in these ports, settlements on its own territory over which the Imperial government was effectively stripped of authority, and which became beachheads for European economic, political, and cultural penetration of China. By the beginning of the twentieth century, European interference in China developed into all-out imperialism, and China appeared on the verge of being partitioned out as colonies of the various European powers. It escaped this fate, at least in part, only because the European states could not agree with one another about a partition plan, while the United States, newly a world power, resisted any outright partition for fear that its own commercial interests would be shut out.
How, in the course of a century, did Westerners go from accepting polite rejection at the hands of China to imposing their will on it by force? How did the Chinese respond to the challenge posed by the West? ...