The two Opium Wars, fought from 1839-1842 and 1856-1860, have been understood by the Chinese as the beginning of their "Century of Humiliation" at the hands of Western powers, most notably Britain.
Early in the nineteenth century, an insatiable appetite for Chinese goods, such as tea, silk and china, led Britain into a trade deficit with China. To combat that, Britain significantly increased its opium trade with China. It used opium from India, which it controlled, to finance its purchases of Chinese goods. The Chinese government, seeing the extent to which opium addiction was affecting its people, decided to enforce its ban on the opium trade. In turn, England found excuses to go to war with China and easily defeated the badly weakened country. It then imposed harsh and humiliating treaties on the Chinese, which included payment of indemnities and forcing the Chinese to cede Hong Kong to the British. Although Britain, at the time the premier world power, spearheaded the effort, other Western powers also made lucrative inroads into China.
The Opium Wars could be seen as a moral low point for Britain in its zest to exploit the resources and peoples of other nations. The Chinese tried in vain to appeal to Queen Victoria to ban the sale of opium on moral grounds, and Gladstone, the British prime minister, decried the trade as evil.
The legacy of these two wars was years of distrust in China. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the country became communist and turned inward, taking control of its own destiny and growing into a major world power determined to protect its interests in Asia. The legacy also arguably impacted twentieth-century world politics: the English and French imposed similarly humiliating terms, the Versailles treaty, on the Germans after World War I, which did not go over well with Germany, and although the period of profitable imperialism was waning, Hitler waged war in part to build a similar empire to what the British had.
