Lonely Planet China Guide: Chinese Culture & History
Table of contents for Lonely Planet China Guide: Chinese Culture & History
- Lonely Planet China Guide: Chinese Culture & History
Today, Silk remains one of China’s finest exports. As does the exquisite ?? , or porcelain, of towns like ?? can attract huge prices from collectors. This piece alone is worth over 1 million US dollars. By the 18th century, one of China’s most prized products would create a close but uneasy relationship with the small European nation, Britain. Its tea time.
This is the largest tea market in China. Some of this tea will go on to be sold for ten thousand dollars a pound. It’s amazing to think that even when the Venetian traveller Marco Polo passed through here in the early 13th century, tea had already been a major crop in Fu Jin province, for over 800 years.
Such was the value of the tea trade, and the western nations resorted to some very aggressive tactics to gain control. Angried for an interference, China attempted to close ports such as Wang Ju, but the nation which invented gunpowder, was by now, no match for the new military might of the west.
In this story, the Brits are the bad guys. They were pushing opium into this country on a massive scale. In essence, the British empire was a big drug dealer. The British, French and American use of opium to trade for tea had resulted in 20 million Chinese addicts. So commissioner Lin Zhou Shu, ordered that all British opium be destroyed. Doing so, he became the leader of this rebellion, was turned into a war, the opium war.
This is part of a series of posts, you can read the rest of it by clicking on the links for the Table of Contents at the top of this post.
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