Tagged: opium wars

The Trade Deficit Britain Closed With Opium

Britain drank Chinese tea and China wanted almost nothing Britain made, so the bill was settled in bullion, roughly £30 million of silver between 1760 and 1800. The East India Company's answer was to build a second consumer market on the other side of its own empire, and it worked exactly as a balance-of-payments device is meant to.

The Tea Heist Everyone Remembers Wrong

In 1848 a disguised Scottish botanist smuggled 20,000 tea plants out of China for the East India Company. Most of them died. The workers and the know-how he brought with them are what actually broke China's tea monopoly.