The Qing Empire running out of silver

[u/Possible_Guidance491]

Author: Goobsinist

[u/ManOf1000Usernames]

Don't worry Qing China! Jesus' little brother is here to fix everything!!

[u/Leading_Road]

Yeah when you demand payment in only silver and reject all other trade goods the britsh empire will do some evil shit to fix there trade deficit. Before the opium trade the British empire was hemreroging silver to china for tea imports at a similar rate that china was afterwards. What happened to china with the opium wars is an example of what happens when you refuse to modernize stick your head in the sand and declare yourself superior to industrial empires who both literally and figuratively out gun you.

[u/LeDemonicDiddler → u/Leading_Road]

I would also add that the heavily restrictive canton system had a hand in this as it added to the diplomatic and trade frustrations that lead to opium being the thing to sell in China. Also realistically I feel like there wasn’t much that could’ve been about the trade imbalance at the time in a short span of time cause there was just fundamentally too many things going on. Like what could Britain have sold to China that wasn’t illegal that the Chinese at large wanted? The Chinese population at this point would not have the desires for what Britain sold nor the money as most of the people there were poor peasants. The last time China was seriously in a war was against the dzungerian mongols over 80 years ago and since then have gone complacent, stagnant, and ignorant of global affairs at large. Britain wanted a more equal trade system whilst denying it to the Qing while the Qing didn’t see a reason to change anything for something obvious worse in their minds for them. Like hindsight is 20/20 but given the various factors including ones I didn’t or forgot to mention there’s not quick and easy fix that would’ve prevented the war as a whole.

[u/Geggor → u/Leading_Road]

There's also the issue that China had 60% of all the mined silver in the world due to their historical trade demand. So when the British found the Opium exploit, their economy immediately went into crisis since they never experienced silver trade deficit for centuries.

[u/FogduckemonGo → u/Leading_Road]

The opium wars were amongst the scummiest things Britain did in the 19th century, and that's from a very long list. But yes, it's possible to admit the weaknesses and corruption of Qing China whilst condemning Britain for its greed and cruelty.

Unfortunately, history gets greyer and darker, the more you look.

[u/barbarball1 → u/Leading_Road]

Europeans: why chinese & indians say we are monsters that want exterminate and point nuclear bombs to our capitals 😭

Also Europeans: say this class of stuff

Man i dont know where are you from, but as a south american i honestly think europeans could devolve in smt so horrible like 18-19 century for asians if werent for all the nuclear bombs china & india had lol

[u/jfkrol2 → u/barbarball1]

I mean, part about trade with China being a massive drain on the treasury (because Chinese only accept silver and won't buy anything in return) extended back to Roman Empire

[u/wewwew3 → u/barbarball1]

no one is saying British we right. But denying historical cause and effect is also wrong.

Also, how do you know op is European?

[u/Blitcut]

This isn't quite true though. As Stephen R. Platt calculates in "Imperial Twilight: China's Last Golden Age" in 1830 British merchants exported about 19 000 chests of opium to China enough for about 150 000 habitual users or about 0.04% of the total population. Now most would likely not have smoked opium daily so the total number of smokers would be higher, but the lower the dosage the fewer the problems of course. Opium did though become a massive problem later as the Qing legalised it to raise funding to fight the Taiping rebellion (often erroneously blamed on the Treaty of Tientsin) at which point domestic production picked up.

There's a similar story for the silver, even though the opium trade didn't help of course the real issue was the Spanish American war of Independence upsetting the quantity of silver on the market which ended up being felt by the Qing as they relied on imported silver. However as Julia Lovell shows in "The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China" the silver balance would against shift as the situation in the Spanish Americas stabilised even as opium imports increased.

[u/Karmaless-user]

Opium wasn’t actually smoked as much as it was used as a currency in areas to replace dwindling silver supplies.

If the British could pay in silver, that would actually have resolved all of China’s issues. However, there’s a reason Long John Silver’s parrot squawks “Pieces O’Eight,” it’s because peasants only recognized Spanish pieces of eight minted during the reign of Charles II as legal silver tender because of the highly distinct heraldry stamped on it. The illiterate Chinese peasantry would not trust Pound Sterlings or US silver dollars, and as the supply of pieces of eight ran out, the population had to turn to an alternative that had demand and was easily stored and divided.

Opium.

I’m honestly disappointed in the sheer misinformation in this thread. British opium didn’t bring down China as much soil exhaustion, mass infanticide and the growing demographic and agricultural crises that were gripping the nation by the beginning of the Daoguang era. Qing China was beginning to fall victim to the same forces that claimed dozens of dynasties before it, and it really can’t be said that the British arrival and unequal treaties could have hurt China more than it was hurting itself at that point. The unequal treaties were more symbolically humiliating than actually punitive, as the trade deficit with China actually increased following the 1839 Opium War.

There’s a huge problem with western biased historical sourcing at the end of the Qing. Poor populations in trading areas where British missionaries and other Europeans were would have had much easier access to opium than the inland peasants that formed the bulk of the population. When corroborated with Chinese sourcing, the Qing were in a world of hurt by the time the Europeans rolled around.

[u/Adventurous_Ad_1735 → u/Karmaless-user]

Qing was on the way out as with most other historic chinese dynaties
an uneasy peasant population due to multitude of reasons, u mentioned soil exhaustion which i didnt know, but also abysmal disasters response, corruption, eunuch/nobility control over emperors, etc

the taiping is a weird version of the typical peasant rebels in chinese history, and the qing has a great amount of such rebels

the only different thing abt Qing was, it was basically propped up by GB and later US to maintain a big market instead of waiting for a new chinese dynasty with renewed vigor