Episode Details
Back to EpisodesThe Opium Wars - A Habit Becomes an Empire (Part One)
Description
Walk into a chemist's shop in Victorian Britain and you could buy opium over the counter, no questions asked. It was in the medicine cabinet, the nursery, the labourer's cottage, as ordinary as tea or gin. So how did a drug Britain barely thought twice about at home become the trigger for one of the most consequential wars of the nineteenth century?
In this first episode, we trace opium's journey from the "joy plant" of ancient Mesopotamia to the poppy fields of British Bengal — and follow the money as Britain's insatiable thirst for Chinese tea creates a trade problem that opium, smuggled by the shipload, conveniently solves.
Along the way: the East India Company's carefully deniable supply chain, the "fast crabs" running chests ashore under cover of darkness, a Chinese court torn between legalising the drug and stamping it out, and the incorruptible Commissioner Lin Zexu, whose letter of conscience to Queen Victoria vanished into the machinery of empire. Then one besieged British official makes an unauthorised promise worth twenty thousand chests of opium — and two empires that barely understand each other begin their slide toward war.
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