Word: opium
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...afire; under small-arms fire from a cemetery near by, some 30 persons inside crawled out on their bellies. Five shells hit the rickety Constellation Hotel, where women and children crouched in the bar and cried. As the barrage kept up, flash fires raced through the flimsy brothels and opium dens along the Avenue of Evening Paradise. Risking the crossfire, prostitutes and addicts joined the long lines of refugees that padded along the banks of the Mekong River to catch a ferry across to safety in Thailand...
...only Western commodity that interested the Chinese mandarins was gold, and the China trade might have drained all the gold out of Europe if shrewd merchants like Jardine, Matheson, Dent and Joseph Henry had not found a substitute currency in opium grown in British India. They were soon landing the drug in the Pearl River estuary at the rate of 6,000,000 lbs. a year. They defended themselves morally by calling opium "a harmless luxury and precious medicine except to those who abuse it," while taking the business line that if they did not sell it to the Chinese...
These measures failing, the imperial government seized and burned the British opium stocks at Canton. In the Opium War that followed, the primitive Chinese navy was blown to pieces and its feudal armies scattered. Under the peace treaty, the humiliated Emperor had to permit free trade at five Chinese ports, pay an indemnity of $21 million, and give to the British "a large and properly situated island" off the coast, "from which Her Majesty's subjects in China may be alike protected and controlled...
Hong Kong's warehouses were soon piled high with opium, and some 80 clipper ships smuggled the drug to Chinese dealers along the 4,000-mile coast of the mainland. Reckless men poured in from every land. When the potent Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corp. was founded in 1864, it was backed by 14 different firms-British, American, German, Indian, Turkish, Danish-and its first manager was a Frenchman. A British visitor warned that "anyone compelled to come by duty to Hong Kong should have a stout heart and a lively trust in the mercy...
...Though opium was not officially outlawed in Hong Kong until 1945, the merchant taipans gradually shifted to less questionable ways of making money. Creating nothing itself, Hong Kong became a vast free port and shipping point. The colony expanded to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 and took the New Territories on a 99-year lease from China in 1898. Every disorder on the mainland increased the power and population of Hong Kong. By the turn of the century, 230,000 Chinese were residents; in the 1930s, the chaos caused by Japan's invasion of China brought in a million...