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

Robert Fortune's mission of 1848 to 1851 delivered upwards of 20,000 Chinese tea plants and eight tea makers to the East India Company's Himalayan gardens. The industry that broke China's hold on the export trade grew in Assam, on Assam's own plant, with Chinese tea makers hired a decade before him.