A Hundred Years of Humiliation of China: The Opium Wars

How could one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated civilizations, shaped for centuries by Confucian philosophy, suffer a humiliating defeat at the hands of Britain, a relatively small island nation, during the Opium Wars? How did this defeat usher in what the Chinese now remember as the “Century of Humiliation”? Why was China—then the world’s largest economy, possessing the most advanced bureaucracy and the greatest productive capacity—unable to recognize the transformative impact of the Industrial Revolution? More importantly, what lessons has modern China drawn from this painful chapter of its history?







