Not everything was destroyed however, with thousands of exquisite artworks, sculptures, porcelain, jade, silk robes, elaborate textiles, gold objects and more being looted, finding their way to museums (UNESCO lists 47) around the world, where they still sit.īy the end of the Opium Wars, some 50-60,000 barrels, weighing an average of 140 pounds (63.5 kg) each, were being shipped into China annually, a figure which continued to rise over the next three decades. The destruction of the Palace buildings was total. The palace was so large, covering more than 3.5 square kilometres, it took 4,000 men three days to destroy it. That greed it satisfied by foisting massive amounts of opium upon the Chinese people, so to balance its trade with China, as it had nothing else needed by ‘the Middle Kingdom.’ To put it bluntly the British operated as ‘drug lords.’ When China tried to stop the trade of a good, which Britain itself had banned in its own domain, the British response was to declare war, not once but twice, to defend the trade.ĭuring the second of these wars in October 1860 such was the thirst for vengeance on China, not seen to be sufficiently acquiescent, that the British, along with French troops, burned and looted the wondrous Summer Palace or Yuanmingyuan, described by the French writer Victor Hugo as, ‘one of the wonders of the world’. Particularly trenchant has been the criticism of Great Britain, the land whose rapacious greed led to its using military power to open Qing China to exploitation. It is as though Britain, Germany, France, and Japan still cannot accept that the country they, along with Russia, once divided into spheres of influence, to be exploited, now having put the ‘century of humiliation’ behind it, dares stand on its own feet.

Much of it emanates from the very nations responsible for the dividing up of China into spheres of influence in the late 19 th and early 20 th century. The direction from whence comes most of the anti-China rhetoric in the world today is hardly surprising.

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