Thread by @authorAneesh

British purchased tea from China in huge quantities.

British payed for all that tea in hard cash so trade imbalance.

So EIC forced Opium on Chinese by channelling it through non state actors

That being a cute term for smugglers since Opium officially banned in China.

Where did they grow that Opium ? On thousands of acres of land in India ! India was a manufacturing base for supplying to Chinese ..lol

Opium provided EIC with 30% of its revenue and basically financed the economic stability of the empire.

Ofcourse , Chinese authorities connived and looked the other way and got their chai Pani to keep things running

One fine day some upright fellows took charge . And applied the law.

All hell broke loose

EIC put its gunboats into action and fought for its smugglers and wheelers and dealers in China. We know these events as the Opium Wars.

Opium kept EIC afloat

Where did the money to fight 1857 come from ? Opium obviously.

All the debts and interests piled up by the EIC got wiped out by the Opium trade.

Wonder what they would have done of no Chinese to consume opium 🤔

Opium was also linked to India's first Telecom scam.

The Telegraph was introduced in mid 1850s and five years later crooks had already gamed it 🤣

Opium prices would be wired from Galle to Madras to Pune onward to Mumbai. At Katraj near Pune the line was "tapped"

This gave dealers advance notice of prices received for their opium , allowing manipulations.

Opium fraud of 1861

A small bit of info received from a Singhpo tribesman perhaps prevented another Opium war , who knows.

But Indian tea slowly replaced Chinese tea. British did not have to pay anything for it , except some peanuts to indentured labour in Assam.

dnaindia.com/analysis/colum…

Ingenious people

🤣🤣

Till the 1880s, China supplied almost 100% of England's tea. Opium trade boomed in same era.

By end of the century , Indian tea had taken over 80% of the trade !

Opium the cash crop was planted on 7 lakh acres of Indian soil.

Consequently we had no food to eat when required the most :(

The returns on Opium were four times the production cost !!!

After over fifty years of booming trade (?) / Smuggling /Forcing Opium into China it was brought to an end.

Tea ,the root reason for the export of opium to was now being grown over thousands of acres in Assam and Ceylon. And there was a new golden egg laying goose - Cotton.

The boom in tea cultivation in India led to end of the Opium trade with China.

One of the first Indian Tea plantations owner was Maniram Dewan . He later fought British in 1857 ,one of the reasons being British treatment of Indians on Tea Plantations.Was hanged in February 1858

Britain paid in cash or rather silver bullion for all that Chinese tea. This led to a trade deficit.

At the other end , Opium was sold on the black market in China and Britain's cash was returned to it.

Karachi , a major port for traders dealing in Malwa Opium looking to circumvent the British territories.

The Bombay _ Karachi trade and smuggling arc @Kal_Chiron

The annexation of Sindh (1842) enabled the EIC to considerably raise the octroi on Malwa Opium which now had no option but to be traded via Mumbai , then Bombay

The Chinese in 1839 decided to follow the law and confiscated all the opium which anyways was banned stuff.

The EIC gravy train came to an abrupt end.

How could the Chinese just follow their own laws which were publicly known.

So the EIC deployed warships , guns and thousands of soldiers to back up their non state actors.

The Opium War of 1841 saw the debut of the iron clad battleship.

HMS Nemesis