@spaceandtime #SXT Textbooks give a simplified version: Britain sold opium, poisoning the Chinese people; Lin Zexu banned opium, and Britain went to war. The real story is much more complicated. The root cause of the war was trade; opium was just the trigger. The Qing court allowed foreign trade only through Guangzhou, and even then it had to go through the Hong merchants as middlemen. Tea and silk could be sold freely, but British goods couldn’t get in, so silver poured into China. During the Qianlong reign, 16.4 million taels flowed in over ten years. Britain was a gold-standard country, and silver