Étiquette : Mexico

 

Britain’s Opium Wars Against China, Key to Understand the Present

Michel Panet (standing left), President of the Association Carrefour France-Sichuan, with Karel Vereycken (sitting on the right).

Dear guests and friends, Good Evening,

First of all, I would like to thank Carrefour France-Sichuan Association (ACFS) and its president Michel Panet for this kind invitation.

1. Introduction

I will start my presentation by talking about the present. We will then travel back in time to better understand what is happening to us today.

At the end of the Cold War and after the breakup of the USSR, it was hoped that peaceful cooperation would bring about lasting peace in the world. Unfortunately, today many conflicts have been rekindled.

From the China Sea to the Panama Canal, via Ukraine, Palestine, Greenland and Canada, the words « tariffs », « sanctions », « high-intensity wars », « annexation », « ethnic cleansing » and « genocide » have made a comeback, and unfortunately, they are not just words.

With regard to China. While we can rejoice that the prospect of a settlement through diplomatic channels is emerging to end the conflict in Ukraine, many analysts fear that the United States is mereley seeking to extinguish this conflict in order to have a free hand for a confrontation with China, designated in 2022 by the « kind » Democrat Antony Blinken as the country « which is, in the long term, the most serious threat to the international order. »

It is true that Donald Trump, after having exchanged on December 16 with Chinese President Xi Jinping on trade, the social network TikTok and fentanyl (a drug produced and distributed by the Mexican Cartels which has caused 100,000 deaths in the United States and whose precursors come partly from China), repeated almost word for word what he had said in 2017: « by working together, China and the United States can solve almost all of the world’s problems ». A few days later, as we know, he announced an increase in customs duties on foreign products, notably Mexican, Canadian, European and Chinese while showing himself willing to negotiate the time frame of their implementation.

This rivalry between the United States and China is reminiscent in many ways of the situation preceding the « opium wars » that I will talk to you about this evening.

Since the banking crisis of 2008, the current financial system has been in a state of virtual bankruptcy. Gigantic financial schemes, called derivatives and securitizations, mechanically generate financial bubbles. And like soap bubbles, financial bubbles inevitably end up exploding. When they burst, panic sets in and the system grinds down.

In 2008, the highest authorities of the UN in charge of the fight against narcotics admitted : the banking system, especially the interbank market which had come to a complete standstill, had been « lubricated » by billions of dirty money from crime, fraud, corruption, terrorism and drugs.

Worse still, after the crisis, nothing was done to prevent such a solution from repeating itself. No meeting of the European Council, the IMF or the G20 was devoted to the subject. Let us recall that it was only after the attacks of September 11 that the beginnings of the fight against the laundering of dirty money were outlined. Since then, the surveillance bodies set up were immediately diverted from their initial purpose. To this day, it is the strongest who use them to spy on and subjugate their enemies and vassals.

All this is reminiscent of the pitiful state of the British Empire at the end of the 18th century. A systemically bankrupt monster, the British Empire then chose drugs and war to perpetuate the privileges of its oligarchy in the name of « customs duties » and unregulated « free trade » as free as the fox in the henhouse.

The history of the Opium Wars shows that drug trafficking and war are not things that « happen to us, » but choices that corrupt elites impose on entire societies. Drugs are not something that « happens to us » through foreign aggression, but rather a choice that our leaders make through their acts and acts of omission.

As we documented in this book (shows book), the heirs of what was set up by the British following the Opium Wars, notably the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) and the other « pearls of the Crown », that is to say the tax havens, allow a globalized narco-finance to prosper in full daylight and with complete impunity. By its size, this narco-finance has gone from « too big-to-fail » to « too big-to-jail ». Unless this taboo is lifted now, nothing serious can be done to eradicate the deadly narcotic business.

I will focus here on the (not so hidden) economic and financial stakes behind the opiim wars, which few historians dwell on. As long as we do not understand the driving force behind events, they will tend to repeat themselves. And as Marx once said, when history repeats itself, the first time it repeats as a tragedy, the second time as a farce.

Both Tragedy and farce, today, with the « white tsunami » of cocaine and ecstasy, and the corruption that accompanies it and which is eating away at France above all, history is repeating itself.

2. Deconstructing the « narrative »

The official « narrative », if it appears in school textbooks, presents the Opium Wars as a clash « between two empires » that they want to put on an equal footing, each with « its addiction » and each with its hypocritical and greedy elites:

  • Among the English, we are told, the addiction is tea; among the Chinese, opium. Let us recall all the same that we have never seen Chinese warships bombard English ports to force the British to consume Chinese tea…;
  • The British, we are told, advocated an « open door » policy, they sought to « open China » to « free trade, » Christianity and democracy;
  • The dangers of opium are « exaggerated, » the English have always told us. Laudanum (a few opium poppy seeds dissolved in ethanol) was freely available in their country, so why not elsewhere?
  • The British, we are told, only wanted to « satisfy » a demand and not to create it. If they had not sold their Bengali productions, others would have sold theirs, notably the Iranians and the Turks.

Fundamentally, this « narrative » is entirely false and at the very least without nuance, but it is the « narrative » of many conferences on the subject that most often end up, and this is logical, by advocating the choice rejected by the Chinese emperor and his advisors, that of the legalization of all drugs. Which goes to show that narratives are never neutral.

In any case, it is not a question of « two empires seeking to dominate the world »:

  • China, through its territorial and demographic expansion, but in a system favoring creativity and progress, must certainly face a strong and sometimes terrible « growth crisis » with populations demanding their share of development;
  • In contrast, for the British, war is written into the DNA of their system: a monetarism thriving on the rent drawn from land, possessions, raw materials and slaves to exploit them, all acquired at low prices and sold to the highest price, whether it be tea, opium and from Hong Kong, Chinese coolies sold to the United States.

3. Opium and its history

a) Plant and consumption

Before we continue, a few words about the product. What is opium?

Latex running out of opium poppies.

What we call opium is the latex (dried juice) produced by incision of the capsule before maturity of a plant, the « opium poppy » ( Papaver Somniferum ). Now what is special about opium is that it contains dozens of alkaloids that are used in pharmacy, more precisely morphine and codeine, two powerful analgesics.

Opium is consumed mainly in two ways:

  • In solid form (balls)
  • In liquid form (mixed with alcohol)
  • Smoked (with or without tobacco)

Like most drugs, opium can make you sleepy as well as overexcited. Like cocaine or captagon, it can make you insensitive to pain, a property much appreciated by warriors. In all cases, it gives you an illusory feeling of pleasure that you will find very difficult to do without. Opium dens, said one writer, are par excellence « the place where artificial paradises meet a real hell. »

b) Medical use

Recent archaeological studies have shown that it was in Switzerland that Neolithic farmers enabled the domestication of the opium poppy between 5 and 6 millennia ago.

Opium quickly entered the pharmacopoeia of Mesopotamia, Egypt and ancient Greece. Homer describes its use. The Arabs, the Venetians, the Portuguese, the Dutch and then the British were the first traders in opium.

In the United Kingdom, as we have already reported, laudanum, composed of a few poppy seeds in alcohol (wine or ethanol), was used for medicinal purposes.

Invented by the Swiss Paracelsus, this drink was sold over the counter at a low price in British pharmacies. Highly addictive and often fatal, because it contained morphine and codeine, laudanum was supposed to relieve the pain of coughs and migraines while offering a trance and ecstasy to poets lacking imagination. England consumed between 10 and 20 tons of opium per year for « medical use ».

Via the Silk Roads, opium was introduced to Central Asia and China during the Tang Dynasty (618-907). Its consumption, for medical use or as a kind of Viagra, remained marginal due to its foreign origin and its high price.

c) Tobacco

This situation would change radically in the 16th century with the arrival in the New World of Nicotiana tabacum, tobacco , consumed above all in America in the form of chews to quench hunger and thirst.

The « taking » and « chewing » of tobacco took over the whole of Europe and beyond, Asia, in a few decades. Smoking arrived in Italy in 1561, by Cardinal Prospero di Santa-Croce; in England in 1565; in Germany around 1570 by the Huguenots moving away from France; in Vienna in the same years. In 1580, it reached Turkey, which opened the door to Asia, where tobacco consumption became widespread in a few decades.

At the turn of the 16th century, the introduction of the pipe in Southeast Asia by the Portuguese and the Spanish marked a decisive turning point. First the Portuguese and then the Dutch, having clearly identified the extent of smoking in China, to boost their sales by making tobacco more addictive, dipped it in opium to obtain the famous madak.

The craze was immediate. Quickly, consumers, installed in nicely furnished living rooms when they were the upper classes, or in unsanitary slums for the poor populations in Jakarta, preferred to smoke madak and later chandoo (an opium refined to be smoked) with long pipes. It should be noted that smoked, opium « gains advantages » for the consumer: the risk of overdose is much lower than orally and the pleasure effect is no longer delayed but almost immediate.

Before the arrival of tobacco, China had already opened its doors to new crops from the New World, including corn, sweet potatoes and peanuts. While the consumption of these last three improves life expectancy, that of tobacco reduces it substantially. Smoking remains a major scourge in China. In 2020, with 300 million tobacco smokers, China still holds the world record for the number of smokers…

In the end, even before the British imposed legal opium production and consumption on China through war, the country already had an estimated 4 million to 13.5 million opium addicts. With at least 40 million opium users in China in 1949, Chinese opium addiction, on a state-wide scale, remains the largest wave of drug addiction in history.

The UN, in a report of 2008, stated that,

4. Trade with China

Before the Opium Wars, China had become a major economic and political power. Thanks to improved nutrition, the population of China increased from 100 million at the end of the 17th century to 430 million by 1850. Although there were fifteen major peasant revolts, some of which lasted for many years, the country was relatively self-sufficient.

Compare this with the number of inhabitants of the British Isles, estimated at less than 17 million in 1810, around 10 million in England and Wales, 5 million in Ireland and less than 2 million in Scotland, without taking into account the « great famine » which decimated at least 1 million people in Ireland in 1845, due to lack of potatoes (while Britain was growing tons of opium in Bengal !).

Direct foreign trade between China and European countries began in the 16th century, with the Portuguese as their first economic partners (1517), to whom the Chinese leased Macao (30 km²) in 1557. Then came the Spanish, who, by the Treaty of Saragossa (1529), legalized their grabbing of the Philippines which initially, by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), were under the rule of the the Genovese bankers dominated Portugese. The Spanish founded Manila there in 1571. And finally the Dutch, who settled in Indonesia, first on the island of Penghu (1603) north of Taiwan, then in 1619 in Batavia (Jakarta, Java, Indonesia), then in Taiwan (1624). The Russians came as neighbors by land.

It is important to understand how China traded with « foreigners » before the Opium Wars. To simplify roughly, we can speak of two systems:

  • the “Tributary System”;
  • the “Canton System”.

a) The « Tributary System »

Kowtow in front of a Ming Emperor.

The term « tribute system » is a Western invention. There was no equivalent term in the Chinese lexicon to describe what would today be considered the « tribute system, » and it was not intended as an institution or system.

The so-called Chinese tributary system or Cefeng system dates back to the Han Dynasty (202-220 BC). It reflected the Chinese worldview according to which China, of virtually uncontested grandeur and autonomy, was the world-civilization, that is, « all that was under heaven » ( tianxia ). The Chinese word for China (Zhongguo) actually means this: « Middle Country ». In this framework, although one can debate the possible interpretations, the Chinese emperor was considered the sovereign and therefore responsible for all humanity.

To organize economic exchanges with other peoples, called « barbarians » and « uncivilized, » the imperial court established a protocol. Non-Chinese could be accepted into the Emperor’s sphere if they were willing to go to court and perform the forbidden ritual of « kowtow » as a form of homage and recognition of his precedence. This prostration consisted of three kneelings and nine prostrations expressing a gesture of deep respect that consists of the person performing it kneeling and bowing so that his head touches the ground.

Kowtow of a Chinese citizen in front of a district judge.

It should be noted that the kowtow was not exclusively required of foreigners, but was also required when a person was, for example, brought into the presence of an official (representative of the imperial authority) for example to plead his case before a local court.

In everyday life in modern China, this gesture is no longer performed in front of a human being. Some Buddhists perform the kowtow in front of statues or a tomb to express the respect shown to the deceased. It is reported that some Buddhist pilgrims perform a kowtow every three steps during their long pilgrimages. It is also a ritual gesture in Chinese martial arts initiation ceremonies.

When visiting the Chinese court, sovereigns or emissaries would offer tribute (gifts) on this occasion. In fact, in exchange for this recognition, the tributaries received sumptuous gifts that often exceeded the value of what they received, thus demonstrating the benevolence and generosity of the Emperor. More important than the tribute, they obtained the implicit promise of protection (possibly military) and commercial rights.

Western observers like to exaggerate the importance of this ritual and see in it, somewhat wrongly, both a clear desire for Chinese domination and a form of active corruption on the part of the tributaries. In reality, the tributary system, which organized China’s diplomatic framework, mainly provided it with a means of regulating the flow of foreign goods across imperial borders. For the tributary states, the status ceremonially granted by the Chinese Court gave them privileged commercial access to Chinese ports. This status was above all protocol and did not necessarily imply strong political control.

Scholars differ on the nature of China’s relations with its neighbors in the traditional period, but generally agree that political actors within the tributary system were largely autonomous and in almost all cases virtually independent. Some historians even argue that China gave rise to a European-style community of sovereign states and established diplomatic relations with other countries around the world in accordance with international law.

The list of countries that paid tribute to China is very long. It includes neighboring countries but also the Portuguese and the Dutch who considered that the commercial advantages obtained in exchange were so advantageous that they willingly complied with it, seeing it only as a formality and a ritual of respect and politeness.

b) The « Canton system »

The second way of trading with China, the so-called Canton (now Guangdong) system, emerged in 1757 under the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). From the beginning of his reign, the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1661–1722) faced a number of challenges, not the least of which was integrating his relatively new minority dynasty from Manchuria into the Chinese Han majority. Support for the previous Ming dynasty rulers remained strong, particularly in the south of the country, including Canton.

Kangxi twice banned all maritime trade for internal security reasons , to prevent any attempted seaborne coups. During the Qing dynasty, no fewer than 15 rebellions took place, including one led by Koxinga, a Ming loyalist, and separately the Three Feudatories Rebellion, which led to the capture of Taiwan in 1683.

After the rebellions were suppressed, Kangxi issued an edict in 1684:

For 160 years, Canton would be the only Chinese port open to trade with the West. Canton, a fortified city 100 km inland on the Pearl River, already by its geography, offered a certain security.

A large city in the south, with good rainfall in the center of the tea-producing region and with a densely populated hinterland rich in productive capacities, Canton is one of the economic lungs of China.

China sets the rules:

  • foreign merchants are not allowed to enter Canton;
  • warships are prohibited there;
  • All orders for export and import must be placed through one of the 13 members (Hong) of the Chinese merchant guild (the co-Hong);
  • The Hongs rented them a small piece of land outside the city walls on the banks of the Pearl River, known as the « 13 Factories »,
  • Western merchants may only be present in the trading posts during the trading season, which extends from June to December. Women and weapons are prohibited there;
  • Westerners can store some goods there, but they are primarily trading posts and offices;
  • The bulk of their goods must remain 13 km to the south, on the island of Whampoa;
Map of the City of Canton, with citywalls and location of « 13 Factories ».
The « 13 Factories » in Canton.
Island of Whampoa.

Since the Portuguese operated from Macau and the Spanish from the New World through Chinese residents in the Philippines, the system would primarily serve a handful of other Western and Christian powers: French, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Spanish, Americans and British.

5. Economic and Financial Stakes

Let us now examine the economic and financial issues, essential to understanding how the logics which, as long as we remain slaves to them, end in war:

a) Tea

The first economic and financial issue at stake was not the Chinese addiction to opium but that of the British to tea. According to legend, tea was discovered in China one day in the year 2737 BC, by Shen Nong. This emperor with the body of a man and the head of an ox wanted to improve the lot of humans and it was to guarantee their health that he ordered his subjects to boil water before drinking it. One day, while he was resting in the shade of a tea plant, he boiled a little water to quench his thirst. Three leaves fell into his cup. He tasted this infusion and found it exquisite. Tea was born.

Tea imports in Britain.

Tea first appeared in China as a medicinal drink and was later consumed daily for pleasure. By the 17th century, tea began to travel to Europe, following the Silk Road. In 1606, the first crates of tea arrived in Amsterdam aboard a ship of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), making it the first shipment of tea in history to be delivered to a Western port. Accounts vary. What is said is that England adopted tea and its rituals after King Charles II received two pounds of black, fragrant leaves from China in 1664.

Old East India House in London.

By the end of the 17th century, tea was the national drink of the Kingdom.

Between 1720 and 1750, tea imports to Great Britain through the British East India Company (EIC) more than quadrupled. Real « tea fleets » developed. In 1766, exports from Canton reached 6,000,000 pounds (2,700 tons). At their peak, in the 1830s, England imported 360,000 tons of tea from China per year.

A minor but not insignificant effect was that the British Treasury also became addicted, not to tea, but to tea revenues, since it levied a 100% customs duty on its import .

As Waley-Cohen writes:

b) Trade Deficit

Even as the EIC’s profits were no longer sufficient to offset the cost of governing India, tea-loving British helped push trade figures with Asia into the red.

While British merchants and the British treasury were enriched by buying tea cheaply, taxing it, and selling it at a higher price, by the 1780s Britain’s trade deficit with China was exploding.

c) Financial Deficit

Silver imports of China. EIC = East India Company; Country traders are undboubtless the Chinese traders importing silver from New Spain (Mexico).

Symptomatic of this imbalance is the fact that the Chinese, who buy almost no goods in return (a little tin and iron), demand silver (metal) as the only accepted means of payment.

It all began in 1571. Until that date, China collected taxes from its inhabitants in the form of corvées or goods. At that time, it decided to levy taxes in silver. On a daily basis, for small daily payments, the Chinese used copper coins with which, when the time came, they could obtain silver ingots (sycees) to pay taxes or make large transactions.

Sycee (lingot of silver metal)

The sycees had no denomination and were not struck by a central Mint. Their value was determined by their weight in « tael » (unit of weight. One canton tael = 37.5 grams, one tael = one thousand copper coins).

Another accepted means of payment was the « piece of eight » or « Spanish dollar », the main international currency at the time. (See box)

« Spanish dollar » also called « Piece of Eight ». The two columns will be intetrated in the american dollar sign ($).
The Manilla-Acapulco trade (China aquiring silver from New Spain (Mexico, Bolivia and Peru) in exchange for porcelaine, silk and tea sold by Chinese traders based in Manilla, the Philippines.
1888 Republica Méxicana silver 8 Reales trade coin, with chinese marks on it to be allowed in China.

Thus, to pay for British imports from China (tea, porcelain, silks), between 1710 and 1759, 26 million pounds in silver went to China, which bought only 9 million worth of goods in return from England.

This situation would become even more critical for the British Empire later. Firstly because of its own colonial policy, because of the speculations leading to the dismantling of the EIC and because of the emancipation movements contesting its policy of plunder and slavery.

In 1773, the American « insurgents » during the Boston Tea Party demanded the right to trade freely with countries outside the British Empire. The French and Spanish Bourbons, seeking revenge for the humiliation suffered in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), supported, first covertly and then openly, the American « insurgents ».

Other countries challenged British hegemony. In Europe, in 1780, the member countries of the « League of Armed Neutrality » (Sweden, Denmark, Russia, the Netherlands, Prussia, Portugal, etc.) demanded their right to trade with America and refused British dictates and sanctions.

Then followed, at the beginning of the 19th century, after civil wars for their sovereignty, a series of « independences » depriving both the English and the Chinese of the precious silver metal that they needed so much, notably Colombia (1810), Venezuela (1811), Chile (1811), Mexico (1811), Paraguay (1811), Peru (1821), Uruguay (1825) and Bolivia (1825).

Added to this, after strong speculative surges, were repeated panics and bank failures: that of 1819 in the United States and those of 1825 (77 banks were declared bankrupt) and 1847 in London.

These shocks contribute to the feeling of panic in the face of a system that is shaking and will contribute to fueling a dynamic of war appearing as the last option to « save » the system.

d) Cotton

Finally, another additional factor upsetting the balance, the mechanization of production lines. The invention of the steam engine, the previous century, led to a mechanized production of cotton by factories in the north of England.

Steam powered ginning of Coton in Britain.

Quickly, the world market was flooded with cheap cotton textiles produced in very large quantities. Textile producers feasted in England and the surplus was absorbed by the Indian market. However, anyone looking to buy goods in India had to obtain « Council Bills », a paper currency issued by the British crown that could only be purchased in London by paying in gold or silver… When the Indians converted these Council Bills into currency, they were given the equivalent in rupees, rupees collected by the British tax authorities on site. As a result, in order to be able to buy the immense quantities now at their disposal, the English merchants established in India also needed an ever-increasing quantity of metal silver.

Boom of the British Coton exports to India.

On the side of their British masters, although the Indian economist Utna Patnaik arrives at the sum of 45,000 billion dollars to quantify all the wealth extorted by the British from India, at the time, the EIC’s account books indicated that the costs of maintaining the Empire exceeded the EIC’s income: for example, from 1780 to 1790, the combined profits from the EIC’s trade with India and China reduced by barely 2 million the debt of 28 million pounds, left over from their conquest of India.

6. Open China!

a) Lord McCartney’s embassy

Lord George Macartney.

Although the First Opium War did not begin until 1839, the first « virtual shot » fired in that conflict occurred fifty years earlier, when the British envoy completely failed in his attempt to « open China. »

This envoy, Lord George Macartney (1737-1806) was a seasoned diplomat known for his efficiency and dynamism. His mission was simple. It was to obtain a privilege that no other country in the world had: diplomatic representation in Beijing and the right for British ships to dock at ports other than Canton.

Tea, porcelain and fabrics in themselves, trade with China was booming to the point that Canton was congested and unable to handle the volumes sought. In bad shape, the British were quick to demand an « open door » policy.

After a year-long journey, at the expense of the British East India Company, the British envoy, accompanied by a delegation of one hundred people, arrived on September 14, 1793. The emperor did not receive them in Beijing, which would have meant a meeting between equals, but in a yurt (tent) erected in front of his mountain residence in Rehe (present-day Chengde), 227 km to the north, where the sovereign retired when it was too hot in the capital and where he would receive the Englishman among emissaries from several other countries.

Emperor Qianlong.

The emperor, a scholar, a calligrapher, a patron of the arts and sciences with a library of 36,000 books, is at the height of his glory. His reign had begun in 1736, 57 years earlier. Under his rule, China became the most populous country in the world and its territory doubled.

Then the inevitable question of ritual prostration before the Chinese emperor arose. Given the commercial stakes, Macartney, in his finest ceremonial costume, said he was willing to engage in kowtow. Only, in exchange, as the representative of the largest Empire on the planet that has just launched the industrial revolution, and convinced that establishing a relationship on an equal footing was already a debasement, he demanded that the members of the Chinese imperial court do the same… before the giant portrait of King George III of England (1738-1820) that he has brought for the occasion!

The mandarins decline, especially since it is unthinkable to do this in front of other foreign delegations! The Chinese then demonstrate their patience and diplomatic genius. Finally, the emperor agrees to receive Macartney if he pays the same homage before the Chinese imperial throne as he is accustomed to pay before that of his own sovereign.

British cartoon mocking Lord Macartney kneeling in front of the Chinese Emperor.

Macartney kneels before the emperor without kissing his hand, which is normal in London but strange in China. This protocol difficulty finally overcome, the interview takes place. He offers the letter from King George III to the emperor. In return, the latter showers the ambassador with precious gifts, but rejects his requests, has him escorted back to his ships and sends him home. He orders his officials in Canton to keep a close eye on foreign merchants in general and the British in particular.

The Emperor examines the 600 gifts Macartney left at the Yuan Ming Yuan (Summer Palace). These gifts – including telescopes and other astronomical instruments, model British warships, textiles and weapons – are of excellent workmanship and demonstrate the scientific knowledge and technical skill of the British. But in reality, while the Chinese would have liked to have access to the steam engine, locomotives and steel rails, the gifts are only intended to display British supremacy in weaponry…

Most accounts of the embassy see Macartney’s refusal to bow to the Emperor as the immediate cause of its failure, but the misunderstanding goes deeper. The Chinese defend a philosophy, the British their Empire with its privileges and possessions.

As is often the case before destructive wars, there is a total lack of empathy, an inability to understand the intention and the frame of reference of the other. People spend their time commenting on the colour of their own glasses. They think they know without taking the time to know. Macartney thought that diplomatic relations could be established with China in the same way as they were established in Europe and on the same basis, while Qianlong expected Macartney to honour him by complying with the Qing ceremonial for the reception of foreign dignitaries. Both were wrong.

The exchange of gifts was another source of confusion. Macartney, for example, was unaware that the golden sceptre Qianlong presented him with was a symbol of peace and prosperity, and rejected it as inappropriate and of little value.

Qianlong, for his part, who was passionate about new technologies, considered in his letter to King George III that the sumptuous gifts from the British were only trinkets and could contribute nothing to the development of Chinese manufacturing. (See box)

Portrait of King George III.

Compounding his performance, Macartney’s constant reversals, which demonstrated his willingness to adapt and compromise, convinced the Chinese that the British were hiding their true intentions, which only served to irritate them. Under these circumstances, the Qing felt no pressure to make any concessions.

In any case, the British demands seemed exuberant to the Chinese. What was the point of an embassy in Beijing, more than two thousand kilometers from Canton, when trade was being negotiated there? After all, the Hongs already supplied all the products the English demanded!

The Emperor Qianlong , who received Macartney, left power in 1796 to Emperor Jiaqing (1760-1820), who was succeeded by his son, the Daoguang (1782-1850).

His suspicions proved fully justified. In the years following the Macartney embassy, the British would ignore Chinese laws and warnings not to deploy military forces in Chinese waters.

  • In 1802, claiming that they wanted to protect Macau from a French invasion, they attempted to seize the enclave leased by China to the Portuguese;
  • Then, during the War of 1812 between the British and Americans, the former attacked American ships deep in the inner harbor of Canton (the Americans had already plundered British ships in Chinese waters);
  • And in 1814, after that country had become a tributary state of China, Nepal was invaded and forcibly incorporated into the British Empire. All this led the Chinese authorities to become very suspicious of the true British intentions.

b) The Opium « Solution »

Producing opium in Bengal and selling it illegally or legally in China then appears to be the obvious solution, because it allows us to « resolve » almost all of the problems we have just mentioned:

In 1825, the EIC’s mere income from opium was sufficient to pay for its imports of tea from China.
  • From 1828, thanks to the opium trade, the trade balance was reversed: more money left China than came in;
  • The flow of silver metal reversed towards the British Empire: between 1808 and 1856, 384 million silver dollars left China for the British Empire thanks to the boom in opium imports, while between 1752 and 1800, 105 million silver dollars went from the British Empire to China thanks to the sale of tea, porcelain and silks. From 1800 to 1818, the annual average of the traffic stabilized around 4,000 chests (each chest containing about 65 kg of opium); from 1831, this figure approached 20,000;
  • The British got enough to buy Chinese tea. In 1839, the revenues from opium alone paid for all the tea purchases;
  • The British Treasury collected customs duties on tea imports, allowing it to modernize the Empire’s Navy, the same Navy that was used to defeat China;
  • British merchants established in India got the necessary silver income to pay the « Council bills » in London, allowing them in return to buy surplus cotton in England.

Aren’t you happy?

7. Opium routes

Britain, India and China: the opium road.

Long before the British, it was the Portuguese and the Dutch who introduced opium into China.

a) Portuguese

Mansion of an opium trader in Macao.

After being banned, as in various other European countries, tobacco was reintroduced into China around 1644 under the Qing dynasty, which, without fully understanding the consequences, made itself vulnerable to the opium scourge by trivializing smoking. In West Bengal, the Portuguese settled in Satgaon from 1536 and then in 1578 in Hooghly, on the Ganges. From 1589, the Portuguese began to bring increasing quantities of opium into China via Macao, a Chinese territory leased to the Portuguese in 1557.

The opium trade played an important role in the economy of Macao for a long time, also representing a significant part of the peninsula’s income. It should be noted that Macao, whose gaming industry is now 10 times larger than that of Las Vegas, just like the Emirates, was removed a few years ago from the blacklist of tax havens to join the « grey list » of « cooperative » tax havens.

b) Dutch

The Dutch come next. At war at home against Spain and in search of financial profits, they dominate the « spice route » and regularly wage war against their Portuguese, Spanish or British competitors.

They settled in Penghu (1603), a small island next to Taiwan, then in 1619 in Batavia (now Jakarta in Indonesia) and finally in Taiwan (1624). The Dutch also opened a base for their Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1659 in Bengal. The Batavians did not do things by halves. In 1740, after the sudden collapse of the price of sugar, the Chinese laborers working in Batavia (Java) whose wages were being crushed, revolted against their employer, the OIC. To avenge the deaths of a good dozen Dutch who perished during the revolts, no fewer than 10,000 Chinese were massacred…

Chinese merchants based in Indonesia and Dutch, from Jakarta (Indonesia), and Portuguese from Bengal (India), will export opium to Guangdong and Fujian (China).

c) Britain and the British East India Company

London: Main office of the British East India Company (EIC).


In India, the English drove out their European competitors (France and Portugal). In 1632, the troops of Emperor Shah Jahan laid siege to Hooghly in Bengal (West India) and expelled the Portuguese. 19 years later, in 1651, the English settled there and in 1690, they made Calcutta, 40 km south of Hooghly, their commercial base in Bengal where they took over opium production.

In 1683, the British East India Company (EIC), whose importance for tea we saw, gave instructions for the first time that opium should be part of its investments.

Meanwhile, in China, the first decrees appeared: as early as 1709, the court declared that opium consumption, prostitution and the corruption that accompanied it, were harmful to people’s physical and mental health. In 1729, opium dens were banned in China. These imperial decrees, which sounded more like warnings and were poorly enforced, gave rise to the establishment of vast smuggling networks thanks to the collaboration of corrupt officials who turned a blind eye to the contents of European ships arriving at the port.

In 1757, following the Battle of Plassey , the British imposed themselves and seized in 1764 what would become the opium poppy producing regions: Bengal (Calcutta) and the bordering states which are, to the north of Calcutta, Bihar and to the east, Odisha.

The modus operandi of this trade will undergo a profound change. Initially, everything is done under the « legal » monopoly of the EIC, then passes into the underworld of the gentleman traffickers.

Modeled after the powerful maritime empires of Antiquity (Athens, Phocaea, Carthage, etc.), Italy (Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, Venice, etc.) and Portugal, the EIC was the largest and richest private (joint-stock) company in history, founded in 1600 by a royal charter of Queen Elizabeth I. In 1602 the EIC arrived in Java in Indonesia, due to its climate, the ideal place for the production of many spices (pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, lemongrass, fennel, anise, ginger, etc.), in 1608 it set foot in Surat, India and in 1613 in Japan. In 1699 it traded with Canton in China.

A state within a state, the EIC levied its own taxes and administered justice through its own courts. And to protect its trade, it had the right to wage war. To this end, it paid for its own armies and leased long-term regiments from the British regular army. It was an entity with sovereign powers. It was accountable to no one except the shareholders it enriched through its worldwide trade in spices, tea, textiles and opium.

Between 1730 and 1770, the EIC imported slaves on a large scale from Mozambique and especially Madagascar into India and Indonesia. In Indonesia, the Dutch militarily drove the British off the « spice route ». In 1773, the British supplanted the Portuguese in India and the EIC imposed its monopoly on the opium trade with China, in particular to finance its own conquest of the Indian subcontinent. In short, the EIC fed « on the beast ».

On the ground, the populations hardly benefited from it. The colonial government of Bengal weakened food crops by directing local production to benefit the trade balance of the British Empire. The export of jute, indigo, cotton, opium and… grains, ensured by European trading houses, made the commercial wealth of the colonial administration.

In 1880, 14% of the revenues of India under British mandate came from opium while its population declined. The beginnings of the territorial establishment of the EIC coincided with the great Bengal famine of 1770 which caused, according to sources, between 10 and 60 million deaths.

Consistent with its vision of financial income and human livestock, the EIC employed in 1805 at Haileybury College, to train its executives, the Reverend Thomas Malthus for whom demographic growth always exceeds the means to support it.

At the producer-consumer level, the EIC knew full well that opium was banned in China. In order not to compromise its tea imports, the EIC therefore invented a stratagem that did the trick.

V0019154 A busy stacking room in the opium factory at Patna, India. L Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org A busy stacking room in the opium factory at Patna, India. Lithograph after W. S. Sherwill, c. 1850. 1850 By: W. S. SherwillPublished: – Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In Bengal, the company organized the large-scale cultivation of the poppy and all the industrial phases of its processing, from the exhausting harvesting of latex by incising the poppy capsules, to the passing of this latex over drying trays, to the pressing into balls which were covered with a layer of crushed and dried poppy stems and leaves, and finally to its packaging in mango wood boxes. Some 2,500 employees working in 100 offices of a powerful colonial institution called the Opium Agency supervised the poppy growers, enforcing contracts and quality with an iron fist. The Indian workers received commissions on each unit produced.

The EIC’s « opium fleet » shipping raw opium from Northern India to Calcutta for auction.

Initially, the crates were sent to Calcutta where they were auctioned. From there, the company could wash its hands of what happened to them, leaving private merchants to venture off the Chinese coast. It is worth noting that the EIC granted licenses to private ships trading with China, licenses which contained a provision that penalized them if they carried opium… other than that supplied by the EIC.

Opium use for non-medical purposes was forbidden in China – the first laws banning opium had been enacted in 1729 – and the EIC did not want to be seen as illegally importing opium, which would have prompted a reaction from the emperor.

Instead, it would use Indian merchants licensed by the Company to trade with China. These companies sold opium for money, particularly around Lintin Island at the mouth of the Pearl River, where Chinese smugglers collected the goods and distributed them throughout China.

Exchange between British and Chinese opium smugglers.

Opium was also shipped to other parts of the Chinese coast, but outside its territorial waters, where it was smuggled into the country on local boats. The smugglers’ payments were made at the Company’s establishments in Canton, and by 1825 the bulk of tea purchases were covered by drug trafficking. By 1830, there were over 100 Chinese smugglers’ boats trading in opium.

In 1858, Karl Marx mocked the false Christian values that the British government evoked in its fight against the Chinese « semi-barbarians » and pointed out the enormous profits:

By the end of the 19th century, the poppy was harvested by some 1.3 million peasant households in what are now Uttar Pradesh and Bihar states. The crop occupied between a quarter and a half of a peasant’s farm. A few thousand workers – in two opium factories on the Ganges – dried and mixed the milky liquid from the seed, made it into cakes, and packed the opium balls in wooden chests.

Opium weighing in India under British rule.

However, judged too corporate, constantly bailed out by the British State, corrupt, managed from London and judged inefficient, it encountered much opposition. In 1832, when its serious responsibility in the haemorrhage of the Treasury’s silver stocks was noted, its monopoly on trade with China was abolished

As Adam Smith wished, who opposed all forms of monopoly, whether private or public, the tea and opium trade was then handed over to more dynamic gentleman traffickers. The Crown, while setting itself up as the guarantor of the « international rules-based order », cultivated the art of black, grey and shady areas (like today’s tax havens) allowing it to triumph.

d) Gentlemen traffickers

Dr William Jardine, the scottish opium billionnaire that got the war started against China.

The leading figure of this species was the Scottish surgeon, Dr. William Jardine , a staunch supporter of the legalization of the opium trade, from which he made his fortune. He was employed by the EIC from 1802 to 1817 before settling in Bombay.

His early success in Canton as a commercial agent for opium merchants in India earned him admission in 1825 as a partner in Magniac & Co., and by 1826 he was in control of the company’s operations in Canton, where he had been operating since 1820.

James Matheson , another Scot, joined him shortly afterwards, and Magniac & Co. was reconstituted as Jardine, Matheson & Co. , the great firm that made its fortune from the sale of opium in China and which still exists today under the name « Jardines » with assets of around $100 billion.

Based in Hong Kong and domiciled in Bermuda (a tax haven suspected of dope money laundering), it officially ceased this trade in 1870 to devote itself to other commercial activities, including shipping, railways, textiles and real estate development.

William Keswick.

To be complete, we must add the Keswick dynasty, whose founder, the Scotsman William Keswick (1834-1912) who would be a major grey emissary at the heart of this nebula.

His grandmother, Jean Jardine Johnstone , was the elder sister of Dr William Jardine, founder of Jardine Matheson & Company.

His father, Thomas Keswick , had married Margaret Johnstone, niece of Jardine and daughter of Jean, and had entered the Jardine business.

Logo of the current Jardine Matheson Group, not any longer in opium.

What drives Jardine and Mathison is an unabashed Sinophobia.

The Chinese, Matheson said, were,

James Matheson.

After China destroyed opium chests seized from British traders in 1839 and ordered Jardine’s arrest for violating all existing laws, he fled to London in 1839. Finally, from 1841 until his death in 1843, he sat in Parliament for Ashburton, representing the Whig party.

It was he who, through lobbying and media offensives in the press, convinced both Parliament and the then Foreign Minister, Lord Palmerston, to whom he sent a letter detailing the strategy that would be adopted to launch the first opium war. The English merchants whose merchandise had been confiscated in Canton would not be compensated immediately. This would be discussed in more detail after the victory. As for the costs of the war, even for a small war England could not afford it. The solution was quickly found: the bill would be presented to the losers, the Chinese.

Speaking of Jardine & Matheson, Waley-Cohen points out:

8. The « religious » factor

What may be surprising today is that Protestant and Catholic missionaries were the natural allies of the traffickers: once they reached the Chinese coast, they landed among the opium merchants on Lintin Island, acted as their interpreters in exchange for places on ships sailing north, distributed their piety tracts as the drugs were unloaded; and, in the Chinese Repository , the main English-language Protestant publication in Canton, they shared a forum for spreading their views on the urgent need to open China by any means necessary.

The Protestant London Missionary Society sent its first representative to southern China, Robert Morrison, in 1807. Mission observers expressed their frustration during the 1830s in the tones of pure imperialist paternalism:

By the 1830s, merchants and missionaries were both advocates of violence.

« When an adversary supports his arguments by the use of physical force, [the Chinese] can be humble, kind, and even good, » noted Karl Gützlaff, a rugged Pomeranian missionary who, during the Opium War, would lead the British military occupation of eastern Chinese territories, managing entire armies of Chinese spies and collaborators.

For its part, London would sanction any English official opposed to the conflict and install military personnel who had triumphed against Napoleon, such as the evil William Napier, Chief Superintendent of British Trade in China who enthusiastically noted in his journal:

9. Consequences of opium addiction

a) Medical and Social consequences

Chinese opium smokers.

Opium quickly caused dramatic health havoc, first among the elite and then among the Chinese people as a whole. Initially, the consumers were scholars, officials and intellectuals. They became totally dependent and ruined themselves to obtain it. For the Jiaqing emperor, his people » waste their time and money, they exchange their silver currency and their goods for this vulgar filth from abroad ».

Opium consumption reduced the life expectancy of Chinese opium addicts, mainly men between the ages of twenty and fifty-five. Habitual smokers (8 pipes per day) died within 5 to 6 years, modest smokers (1 pipe per day) after 20 years. Most opium addicts succumbed before the age of 50.

Opium smokers in Indonesia.

In 1836, even before the British imposed the legalization of opium by war, China already had between 4 and 13.5 million consumers, according to estimates.

Joanna Waley-Cohen, in her book The Peking Sextants, notes that in those days (much like today), everyone could easily find a good reason to indulge in the now ubiquitous drug:

b) Economic, Monetary, FInancial and Political consequences

  • Economically, productivity is falling because of the havoc this drug is wreaking on the Chinese population;
  • On the monetary and financial level, the purchase of opium by Chinese consumers then substantially reduced the quantity of silver, as we have seen, essential to the monetary system. Between 1793 and 1836, the silver reserves of the imperial treasury went from 70 million taels to only 10 million taels. As silver became scarcer, its price soared. As a result, for the Chinese citizen at the bottom of the scale, who, in order to pay his taxes, had to obtain silver with his copper currency, the drop in his purchasing power was brutal. A petition addressed to the Emperor in 1838 expressed alarm at the fact that the « copper price » of silver had suddenly gone from 1000 to 1600 coins! As a result, there was growing discontent against the emperor and the multiplication of peasant revolts,
  • On the political level, members of the Qing government were concerned about the corrupting effect that the establishment and flourishing of a drug culture would have. If the court resolutely rejects any idea of compromise and resists a section of the Chinese elites in favour of the legalisation of opium, it is because it sees all of these factors clearly. But above all, she became aware of the danger that all the oppositions, internal and external, could one day, when the planets aligned, join forces: corrupt elites, nostalgic for the previous dynasty, peasants suffering the collapse of their purchasing power, foreign powers seeking to « open » China to their colonial pillage and Protestant and Catholic evangelists in tune with the opium traffickers, all wanting to conquer the wealth, bodies, minds and souls of the Chinese, including by overthrowing the dynasty.

10. The unavoidable?

a) First Opium War (1839-1842)

Lin Zexu.

If for the English, the situation was restored from 1828, for the Chinese, with more than 10 million people addicted to opium, the situation was untenable. The Emperor Daoguang (1782-1850) then sent the imperial commissioner Lin Zexu (Tse-Hou) (1785-1850) to Canton. A former soldier, a scholar, he was an exceptional man.

In 1839, he arrived in Canton to supervise the banning of the opium trade and to suppress its use. He attacked the opium trade on several levels. First, he tried to reason with the British. To do this, he published in Canton an open letter sent to Queen Victoria (1819-1901), Queen of England since 1837, asking her to stop the opium trade. (see box)

Queen Victoria in 1843.

Without a response from the Queen, China, faced with an existential choice, then decides to apply the law, essential to preserve its integrity and sovereignty.

Overmore, among the scholars advising the emperor, opinions were divided:

  • On one side, those who were keen to target opium consumers rather than opium producers. For them, the production and sale of opium should be legalized, then taxed by the government, an argument that still makes some people dream today. Taxing the drug would make it so expensive that people would have to smoke less of it or not smoke it at all (as if the black market would magically disappear). The money collected from taxes on the opium trade could help the Chinese government reduce the loss of revenue and the flight of money (what a bargain!). The purchase of opium was to be done exclusively with Chinese goods, thus preventing money from fleeing the country (a bit of protectionism to defend the industry!);
  • On the other side, stood those who argued that if the opium trade and the vices that came with it (idleness, prostitution, corruption, addiction, debt, etc.) could not be eradicated, the Chinese empire would have no more peasants to work the land, no more townspeople to pay taxes, no more students to study, and no more soldiers to fight. Rather than targeting opium users, the traffickers had to be arrested and punished.

The second camp is led by Lin Zexu but his strategy was twofold:

  • the rehabilitation of opium addicts. In 1839, there were between 4 and 13.5 million of them. They had 18 months to wean themselves off, they risked the death penalty if they did not give up;
  • the end of impunity for banking and commercial interests, whether Chinese or foreign, involved in the opium trade.

When the British merchants in Canton refused to hand over their drug shipments, Lin Zexu laid siege to the « 13 factories ». He deprived them of their staff, forcing the gentlemen-traders to prepare their own meals and take care of the latrines. On February 26, 1839, to make them understand what awaited them, Lin ordered the hanging of a Chinese trafficker in front of the Cantonese representations of the British merchants who claimed not to be liable to local law.

Despite the hostility of a corrupt part of the Chinese elite, he arrested 1,600 Chinese drug traffickers and confiscated 42,000 pipes and 14,000 cases of opium. But at least 20,000 remained on board the ships off the Chinese coast…

He then issued an order requiring foreign merchants in writing not to transport opium and to allow their ships to be inspected. Captain Charles Elliot, the British Chief Superintendent of Trade in China, called for disobedience and ordered British ships not to sign the agreement because if opium was found, the cargo would be confiscated and the perpetrators executed. The English claimed extraterritoriality and even when a Chinese peasant was killed by the British, they refused to hand the culprit over to the Chinese authorities.

After multiple injunctions, threats and summons, Elliot finally released 20,290 chests of opium to the Chinese authorities. To the British merchants, he assured them that the British Crown would compensate them for the value of the merchandise, estimated at two million pounds. This was the trap he set for Lin Zexu. Elliot and Lord Palmerston, who had made the decision a long time ago to go to war against China, thus creating the pretext to launch the war: British interests had been « plundered » and their flag « mocked ».

The destruction of British opium ordered by Lin Zexu.

Lin, proud of his victory, on June 7, 1839, had the crates opened, reduced the opium to a paste, ground it with quicklime in specially constructed vats, and threw it into the sea. They asked forgiveness from the gods of the sea for polluting it in this way. The foreigners were ordered to abandon the factories and retreat to Macao.

Hong Kong, on the other side of the estuary, was initially only a fishing village. The English who rushed there continued to be harassed by the Chinese who cut off their supplies.

Then, the first British aid arrived. At the naval battle of Chuenbi in November 1839, near Canton Bay, two British ships engage 14 imperial junks and sink four before withdrawing without loss, demonstrating their nation’s technological superiority.

In London, under pressure from the « Big Opium », the merchant lobby led by William Jardine, the British Parliament decided in October to send a military expedition to China. There was not a penny in the coffers, but that was not a problem, the losers would pay the costs.

Lord Palmerston.

Lord Palmerston, British Foreign Secretary, immediately sent instructions to Elliot demanding an end to hostilities. Among the conditions:

  • a preferential trade treaty for the British in China;
  • the opening of four ports (Canton, Xiamen, Shanghai and Ningbo, where illegal opium was already entering China);
  • the ability for British citizens to be tried in accordance with the laws of their country.

Over the next few months, the British withdrew their military and diplomats from Canton, giving the impression to the Qing Empire that they did not want open conflict. It was the calm before the storm.

Palmerston sent a letter to the government of India to prepare the squadron of an expeditionary force: 16 ships of the line, 4 gunboats, 28 transport ships, 540 guns and 4000 men. His first objective was not Canton, but the strategic island of Zhoushan, near the mouth of the Yangtze, about 1500 km from Canton and 1400 km from Beijing.

The final goal sought was very clear: to obtain compensation for the confiscated opium, for the settlement of certain debts of the Co-Hong merchants and for the cost of the expedition, to open the ports of the coast, Canton, Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo, Shanghai to British trade freed from the system of the Co-Hong merchants. Finally, to set up the blockade of Canton, to control the mouths of the Yangtze and the Yellow River in order to paralyze Chinese foreign trade and to seize Pei-Ho (forts of Taku), at the gates of the capital.

The British iron frigate HMS Nemesis, on the right, destroying Chinese jonks.

The fortress fell in a matter of days to the power of the artillery of British ships, notably the HMS Nemesis, considered the English « secret weapon » in the Opium Wars and the first steam frigate in history with an iron hull and watertight bulkheads.

This first flat-bottomed ship equipped with paddle wheels, could easily penetrate the mouths of Chinese rivers. Supposedly built in only three months at the request of the EIC’s « secret committee », Chinese wooden junks could not compete with such a technical feat.

The Europeans, with their steamships, rifles and easy-to-maneuver cannons, won thanks to their technological superiority. The Chinese, on their side, had only a few rudimentary cannons, bows, arrows and spears. But as some battles during the Second Opium War demonstrate, they studied their opponent’s military technology and tried to assimilate it as quickly as possible, but were unable to catch up in time…

After this show of force, the British moved to the Pearl River Delta to subdue Canton. But their conditions for ending hostilities, which included the surrender of Hong Kong Island in exchange for Zhoushan Island, were unacceptable. They captured Canton after three months of fighting, and China agreed to a ceasefire in May 1841.

The British fleet returned to the mouth of the Yangtze and captured the strategic port of Ningbo in October. After repelling Chinese attempts to recapture the place in the spring of 1842, the British sought to strike a blow to prevent a prolonged conflict on land.

They set their sights on Zhenjiang, a city near Nanking where the southern end of the Grand Canal, the most important communication route between the north and south of China, was located. In July, the fall of Zhenjiang led to the closure of the Grand Canal. Faced with the threat to Nanking and the impossibility of navigating the Grand Canal to supply the Chinese troops from the north, the imperial authorities had to capitulate.

Peace negotiations between the British and the Chinese resulted in the signing of the Treaty of Nanking on 29 August 1842 aboard a British warship, HMS Cornwallis , supplemented by two other treaties.

Signing of the Treaty of Nanking.

The clauses of these three treaties recognize the following rights for the British:

  • The transfer of Hong Kong, which will become a military and economic center;
  • Five ports were opened , namely Xiamen, Canton, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai. The British were granted the right to settle in these ports and live there with their families (for merchants). The Treaty of Humen authorized the construction of buildings in these ports;
  • War compensation (expenses + opium) of 21 million yuan, or 1/3 of the imperial government’s revenue, to be paid over a four-year period;
  • Customs : British traders are subject to the payment of customs duties fixed by mutual agreement between the Chinese and the British;
  • Consular jurisdiction law : in the event of a dispute between a Chinese and a British person, a British court will decide on the basis of British laws;
  • Most-favored-nation clause : If China signs a treaty with another power, the privilege granted to the nation in question will also be granted to the United Kingdom.

The United States and France, in 1842, demanded the same privileges as those granted to the United Kingdom. By the Treaty of Wangxia (village near Macao) the Americans obtained them. By the Treaty of Whapoa, in 1844, the French as much. Added to this was the right to build churches, to establish cemeteries and finally, to evangelize. The Chinese would strongly resist in the applying the Treaty of Nanking.

b) Second Opium War (1856-1860)

In 1854, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States contacted the Chinese authorities and requested revisions of the treaties to enter Canton without resistance, expand trade to northern China and along the Yangtze River, legalize the opium trade, and deal with the court directly in Beijing. The imperial court rejected all requests for revisions.

On October 8, 1856, Chinese officers boarded the Arrow, a British ship registered in Hong Kong under the British flag, suspected of piracy and opium trafficking. They captured the twelve crewmen (Chinese) and imprisoned them. The British officially requested the release of these sailors, citing the emperor’s promise to protect British ships, without success. The British then referred to « the insult made to the British flag » by the soldiers of the Qing Empire.

They decided to attack Canton and the surrounding forts. Ye Mingchen, then governor of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, ordered the Chinese soldiers stationed in the forts not to resist.

Corpses of Chinise soldiers at Fort Taku.

American warships bombarded Canton. But the people of Canton and soldiers resisted the attack and forced the attackers to retreat towards Humen. The British parliament demanded reparations from China for the Arrow incident and asked France, the United States and Russia to participate in a multinational intervention. Russia sent its diplomats, without participating militarily.

  • The Second Opium War began in earnest at the end of 1857.
  • On December 28, 1857, the combined fleets of England and France stormed Canton;
  • On March 16, 1858, French Admiral Rigault de Genouilly left Canton with the squadron for northern China;
  • On May 20, 1858, acting in concert with the English, he seized the forts of Takou at the mouth of the Peïho before going up to Tianjan (Tien-Tsin) in the direction of Beijing;
  • On June 24, 1859, Franco-English forces attempted to enter Tianjin;
  • On September 2, 1860, Tianjin was taken.
Treaty of Tien-Tsin.

On June 12, 1858, the British, French, Americans and Russians negotiated the Treaty of Tien-Tsin. (today Tianjin) containing the following clauses:

  1. The British, French and Americans will have the right to establish permanent delegations in Beijing (a city forbidden to many foreigners until then);
  2. Eleven more Chinese ports (see Article XI of the treaty) will be opened to foreign trade (including Yingkou, Danshui, Hankou and Nanking);
  3. Foreign ships (even military ones) will be able to navigate the Yangzi Jiang without control;
  4. Foreigners may travel to the interior regions of China for the purpose of trading, sending missionaries, or any other purpose;
  5. China shall pay an indemnity to England and France of 2 million silver taels each, and compensation to English merchants of another 2 million;
  6. Official letters and documents between China and the United Kingdom shall exclude the character « 夷 » or « yi » meaning « barbarians » when referring to subjects of the British Crown and its officials;
  7. Legalization of opium by China, the illegality of which had not been called into question by the Treaty of Nanking.

The clause providing for the establishment of foreign legations in Beijing met with fierce opposition in the capital, and once Western troops had withdrawn from the forts near Tianjin, the Qing showed no intention of complying with it. They strengthened their fortifications and repelled Western troops who nevertheless managed to reach Beijing. The emperor fled to Rehe, the imperial winter residence, 225 km north of Beijing.

Sacking of the Summer Palace by French and British troops.

A skirmish along the way, coupled with unusually brutal treatment of Western prisoners, prompted them to plunder the Yuan Ming Yuan, the summer palace northwest of the capital that the Jesuits had built for Qianlong just over a century earlier.

It was not just one building, but a vast complex with 200 buildings and beautiful gardens. What could not be taken was smashed into pieces. After a long week of looting and destruction, when Beijing fell, the complex was burned down on October 17.

Map of Summer Palace.
Ruins of the Beijing Summer Palace.
Cartoon of the French engraver Honoré Daumier: « So! Comrade … is this (french wine) not better than O…O…Opium? I will civilize you, Guy! »
Poster celebrating British heroism.

On October 24, 1860, China surrendered. It then signed the Convention of Peking, which ratified the Treaty of Tientsin and ended the Second Opium War.

Convention of Peking.

The Beijing Convention includes the following clauses:

  • China’s recognition of the validity of the Treaty of Tianjin;
  • The opening of Tianjin as a commercial port;
  • The perpetual cession of the south of the Kowloon Peninsula (south of today’s Boundary Street) to the United Kingdom, as well as Ngong shuen chau (called in English, Stonecutters Island), which significantly enlarged the colony of Hong Kong; La Grande-Elle obtained in 1898 a 99-year lease on the New Territories (952 km² constituting 80% of Hong Kong territory) and on 235 islands off the coast of Hong Kong.
  • Freedom of worship in China for Christians;
  • Allowing British ships to take Chinese labour to the Americas;
  • The payment to the British and the French of an indemnity amounting to eight million taels of silver (about 320 tons) for each country;
  • The transfer to the Russian Empire of Outer Manchuria and Ussuri Krai, largely creating the present-day Primorsky Krai, corresponding to the territory of the former Manchu province in Eastern Tartary;
  • The opening of the port of Shamian Island, in Canton, to foreign trade and the completion by the Canton authorities of the construction of the British factory

The Qing government was also forced to sign treaties with Russia, ceding over 1.5 million square kilometers of territory in the northeast and northwest, particularly in Outer Manchuria.

French cartoon (published after the start of Japanese agression of 1894), showing foreign powers carving up china as a pie.

Other conflicts followed, followed by other unequal treaties:

  • the first Sino-Japanese war of 1894;
  • the invasion of the Eight-Country Alliance to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in 1901;
  • Treaty of Versailles in 1921;
  • Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937

11. Hong Kong and the Birth of HSBC

Thomas Sutherland.

Following the Opium War, the British opium dynasties thought of only one thing: getting rich from the now legal sale of opium. Jardine, before his death in 1843, launched a subscription among his clients to create such a bank. However, following persistant acts of Chinese resistance, the Indian producers had seen the value of their assets collapse…

It was not until 1865 that Thomas Sutherland established HSBC.

As tai-pan (top managers) of Jardine Matheson & Company, the Keswick family was closely associated with the development of Hong Kong and the management of HSBC, the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company Ltd, the Canton Insurance Office Ltd (now HSBC Insurance Co), the Hongkong and Kowloon Wharf and Godown Company Limited, the Star Ferry, the Hong Kong Tramway, the Hong Kong Land Investment and Agency Co Ltd and the Hongkong and Whampoa Dock Co Ltd.

Hong Kong office of HSBC in 1901.

In the French economic daily Les Echos of July 18, 2013, business historian Tristan Gaston-Breton , outlines the take-off of Hong Kong thanks to the opium trade:

The island also hosted a large merchant community from India, which founded powerful trading houses there. It controlled the opium traffic from Bengal, which was resold to European trading houses in exchange for manufactured goods. Linked together by all sorts of business relationships, Europeans, Indians and Chinese participated in the same commercial networks and the same traffic.

As early as 1847, the P&O took over part of the opium trade now under British control. In 11 years, it transported 642,000 chests of opium from Bengal and Malaya to Europe despite competition from Jardine & Matheson’s Apcar Line.

The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) was a shipping company founded in London in 1837 by two British businessmen. Since 2006 it became part of the Emirati company Dubai Ports World (DP World).

Sutherland’s idea, Les Echos explains:

12. Conclusion

Jardine’s main office in Hong Kong.

Any sensible person who examines the contents of the « unequal treaties » that were imposed on China will quickly understand to what extent this period is for her a « century of humiliation. »

The label « Opium War » turns out to be a very reductive title since it was, through brutal « gunboat diplomacy », a clear attempt at colonization with a view to perpetuating a monetarist system which carries war within it like clouds carry storms.

Certainly, the Chinese and the British should and could have invented an alternative to the pitfalls of the financial and commercial mechanisms of their time.

Just as we must do today by creating, with the BRICS, an alternative to the current system before it plunges us back into an international conflict.

The English could have invited the Chinese to India to explain how to grow tea there! It was not until the end of the EIC monopoly in 1834 that it became seriously interested in tea growing in India.

To succeed, the EIC had to send Robert Fortune, a botanist, as a spy to bring back from China the tea that would make Darjeeling in India in 1856. The EIC would then grow tea in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from 1857.

The current system has already made the choice of drugs. The highest officials of the UN acknowledged that in 2008, at the beginning of the great financial crisis that continues to weigh us down, the interbank market was able to remain liquid thanks to the acceptance of billions of dollars coming from crime, corruption and drugs.

The Jardines and Keswicks, who have given up opium, continue to make their fortunes in British tax havens. The Jardines firm, which is worth a hundred billion dollars, is now a Hong Kong company domiciled in Bermuda, and Matheson & Co., Ltd., is a London merchant bank.

Like HSBC, these families remain active supporters of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA or Chatham House), the pinnacle of the international financial oligarchy headquartered in London.

In 2012, HSBC Bank, set up by the gentlemen traffickers and their descendants and caught red-handed laundering billions of dollars for Al-Qaeda and the Mexican drug cartels that control a substantial portion of the cocaine and fentanyl trafficking in the United States, was saved thanks to the direct intervention of the British Finance Minister who argued that the banking license of a bank as large as HSBC could not be suspended without causing a crash of the entire global economy. As said before, from « too big-to-fail », they became « too big-to-jail ».

HSBC former office in Shanghai, China.

HSBC, after paying a fine, continues its shady activities, as denounced by the International Consortium of Journalists. It is an « untouchable » bank because it is kind enough to buy the Treasury bonds that allow France to « roll over » its never ending debt.

13. Biography

  • Cantón Álvarez, José Antonio, The sulphurous opium war , Le Monde Histoire & Civilisations, 2020;
  • Lovell, Julia, The Opium War, 1832-1842, Buchet-Chastel, 2017;
  • Waley-Cohen, Joanna, The Sextants of Beijing, Presses universitaires de Montréal, 2002;
  • Travis-Hanes III, W., Sanello, Frank, The Opium Wars, The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of another, Sourcebooks, Inc., 2002;
  • Executive Intelligence Review, Dope, Inc., 1976, 1986;
  • Cartwright, Mark, Fall of the British East India Company , World Encyclopedia, 2022;
  • China365, How the Opium Wars Made China What It Is Today, China365 website;
  • Les Crises, file The Opium Wars in China, November 2012;
  • Paulès, Xavier, The Opium Wars in China , University of Geneva, Chuan Tong International website.
  • Tual, Jacques, Indian Opium and British Imperialism at the Beginning of the 20th Century: The Case of Ceylan, Centre for Research on Travel Literature (CRLV), 2008;
  • Desmaretz, Gérard, The Opium Wars in China , Agoravox, 2024;
  • Chouvy, Pierre-Arnaud, Opium in globalization: the case of the Golden Triangle, Erudit, 2016;
Merci de partager !

Persian Qanâts and the Civilization of Hidden Waters


By Karel Vereycken, July 2021.

World Day of handwashing, UNICEF.

By Karel Vereycken, July 2021.

At a time when old diseases make their return and new ones emerge worldwide, the tragic vulnerability of much of humanity poses an immense challenge.

One wonders whether to laugh or cry when international authorities trumpet without further clarification that to stop the Covid-19 pandemic, “all you have to do” is “wash your hands with soap and water”!

They forget one small detail: 3 billion people do not have facilities to wash their hands at home and 1.4 billion have no access to either water or soap!

Yet, since the dawn of time, mankind has demonstrated its capacity to mobilize its creative genius to make water available in the most remote places.

Here is a short presentation of a marvel of such human genius, the “qanâts”, an underground water conveyance system dating from the Iron Age. Probably of Egyptian origin, it was deployed on a large scale in Persia from the beginning of the 1st millennium BC.



The qanât or underground aqueduct

Typical cross-section of a qanât.

Sometimes called “horizontal drilling”, the qanât is an underground aqueduct employed to draw water from a water table and convey it by simple gravitational effect to urban settlements and farmland. The word qanât is an old Semitic word, probably Accadian, derived from a root qanat (reed) from which come canna and canal.

This “drainage gallery”, cut into the rock or built by man, is certainly one of the earliest and most ingenious inventions for irrigation in arid and semi-arid regions. The technique offers a significant advantage: by conveying water through an underground conduit, contrary to open air canals, not a single drop of water is wasted by evaporation.

Oases’ are NOT natural phenomena. All known oases are man-made. It is the qanât technique that allows man, in a given geographic configuration, to create oases in the middle of the desert, when a water table is close enough to the ground level or at a site close to the bed of a river lost in the sands of the desert.

From Mexico till China, diffusion of qanât technique.

Copied and expanded by the Romans, the qanât technique was carried across the Atlantic to the New World by the Spaniards, where many such underground canals still function in Peru and Chile. In fact, there are even Persian qanâts in western Mexico.


While today this three thousand year old technique may not be appropriate everywhere to solve current water scarcity problems in arid and semi-arid regions, it has much to inspire us as a demonstration of human genius at its best, that is, capable of doing a lot with a little.


The oases of Egypt

Egyptian man-made oasis of Dakhleh.



Today, 95% of the Egyptian population prospers on only 5% of its territory, mainly around the Nile delta. Hence, from the earliest days of Egyptian civilization, irrigation and water storage techniques for the Nile floods were developed in order to conserve this silty, nutrient-rich water for use throughout the year.

The river water was diverted and transported by canals to the fields by gravity. Since water from the Nile did not reach the oases, the Egyptians used the gushing water from the springs, which came from the large aquifer reserves of the western desert, and conveyed it to the fields by irrigation canals.

One of the fruits of this attempt to “conquer the desert” was a sustained habitation of the Dakhleh oasis throughout the Pharaonic period, explicable not only by a commercial interest on the part of the Egyptian state, but also by the new agricultural perspectives it offered.



Roman aqueducts

With its 170 km, 106 of which are underground, the Qanat of Gadara (now in Jordan) is the largest aqueduct of antiquity. It starts from a mountain water source held back by a dam (right) to supply a series of cities east of the Jordan River, in particular Gadara, near Lake Tiberias.
The Qanât Fi’raun, or aqueduct of Gadara, in Jordan.

Closer to us in time, the Qanât Fir’aun (The Watercourse of the Pharaoh) also known as the aqueduct of Gadara, a city today in Jordan. As far as we know, this 170 km long structure, depending on the geography, combines several bridge-aqueducts (of the same type as the Gard aqueduct in France) and 106 km of underground canals using the Persian qanât technique. It is not only the longest but also the most sophisticated aqueduct of antiquity, and the fruit of a years of hydraulic engineering.

In reality, the Romans, hiring persian water experts, did nothing more than terminate in the 2nd century an ancient project designed to supply water to the “Decapolis”, a collaborative group of ten cities founded by Greek and Macedonian settlers under the Seleucid king Antiochos III (223 – 187 BC), one of the successors of Alexander the Great.

These ten cities were located on the eastern border of the Roman Empire (now in Syria, Jordan and Israel), united by language, culture and political status, each with a degree of autonomy and self-rule. Its capital, Gadara, was home to more than 50,000 people and known for its cosmopolitan atmosphere, its own university attracting scholars, writers, artists, philosophers and poets. But this rich city lacked something existential : an abundance of water.

The Gadara qanat made the difference. “In the capital alone, there were thousands of fountains, watering holes and baths. Wealthy senators cooled themselves in private pools and decorated their gardens with cooling caves. The result was a record daily consumption of more than 500 liters of water per capita,” explains Matthias Schulz, author of a report on the aqueduct in Spiegel Online.

Entrance of the Gardara qanât, Jordan.



Persia

The Shahzadeh Garden in Iran, an oasis built with the age-old technique of qanats.
Maintenance



We all admire the roman aqueducts. But few of us are aware that the Romans only adapted the technique of the qanâts developed much earlier in Persia.

Indeed, it was under the Achaemenid Empire (around 559 – 330 BC.), that this technique spread slowly from Persia to the east and the west. Many qanâts can be found in North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Libya), in the South East Asia (Iran, Oman, Iraq) and further east, in Central Asia, from Afghanistan to China (Xinjiang), via India.

The development of these “draining galleries” is attested in different regions of the world under various names: qanât and kareez in Iran, Syria and Egypt, kariz, kehriz in Pakistan and Afghanistan, aflaj in Oman, galeria in Spain, kahn in Balochistan, kanerjing in China, foggara in North Africa, khettara in Morocco, ngruttati in Sicily, bottini of Siena, etc.

Historically, the majority of the populations of Iran and other arid regions of Asia or North Africa depended on the water provided by the qanâts; their construction lifted entire areas to a higher “economic platform”, made deserts habitable and opened new land for agriculture. The map of demographic expansion followed the trail of the development of this new higher platform.


In his article « Du rythme naturel au rythme humain : vie et mort d’une technique traditionnelle, le qanât » (From natural rhythm to human rhythm: the life and death of a traditional technique, the qanât), Pierre Lombard, a researcher at the French CNRS, points out that this is not an artisanal and marginal process:

Until a few years ago, the importance of the ancestral technique of qanât was sometimes ignored in Central Asia, Iran, Syria, and even in the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. For example, the Public Authority for Water Resources of the Sultanate of Oman estimated in 1982 that all the qanâts still in operation conveyed more than 70 % of the total water used in that country and irrigated nearly 55% of the cereal lands. Oman was still one of the few states in the Middle East to maintain and sometimes even develop its qanât network; this situation, apart from its longevity, does not appear to be exceptional. If one turns to the edges of the Iranian Plateau, one can note with Wulff (1968) the obvious discrepancy between the relative aridity of this area (between 100 and 250 mm of annual precipitation) and its non-negligible agricultural production, and explain it by one of the densest networks of qanâts in the Middle East. It can also be recalled that until the construction of the Karaj dam in the early 1960s, the two million inhabitants of Tehran at that time consumed exclusively the water brought from the Elbourz foothills by several dozen regularly maintained qanâts. Finally, we can mention the case of some major oases in the Near and Middle East (Kharga in Egypt, Layla in Saudi Arabia, Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates, etc.) or in Central Asia (Turfan, in Chinese Turkestan) that owe their vast development, if not their very existence, to this remarkable technique.”

On the website ArchéOrient, the French archaeologist Rémy Boucharlat, Director of Research Emeritus at the CNRS, an Iran expert, explains:

“Whatever the origin of the water, deep or not, the technique of construction of the gallery is the same. First, the issue is to identify the presence of water, either its going underground near a river, or the presence of a water table under a foothill, which requires the science and experience of specialists. A motherwell will be dug to reach the top of the water table, indicating at which depth the [horizontal] gallery should be drilled. It’s slope must be very small, less than 2‰, so that the flow of water is calm and regular, and conduct the water gradually to the surface area, according to a gradient much lower than the slope of the foothill.

“The gallery is then dug, not starting from the mother well because it would be immediately flooded, but from downstream, from the point of arrival. The conduct is first dug in an open trench, then covered, and finally gradually sinks into the ground in a tunnel. For the evacuation of soil and ventilation during excavation, as well as to identify the direction of the gallery, shafts are dug from the surface at regular intervals, between 5 and 30 m depending on the nature of the land ».

Aireal view of persian qanât system.

In April 1973, Lyndon LaRouche’s friend, the French-Iranian professor and historian Aly Mazahéri (1914-1991), published his translation from Arab into French of “The Civilization of Hidden Waters”, a treatise on the exploitation of underground waters composed in the year 1017 by the Persian hydrologist Mohammed Al-Karaji, who lived in Baghdad. (Translated in English in 2011)

After an introduction and general considerations on geography, natural phenomena, the water cycle, the study of terrain and the instruments of the hydrologist, Al-Karaji gives a highly precise technical outline of the construction and maintenance of qanâts, as well as legal considerations respecting their management and maintenance.

Commentary on the qanâts in the treatise of Al-Karaji (11th century).

In his introduction to Al-Karji’s treatise, Professor Mazaheri emphasizes the role of the Iranian city of Merv (now in Turkmenistan). This ancient city, he says, was part of

“the long series of oases extending at the foot of the northern slope of the Iranian plateau, from the Caspian to the first foothills of the Pamirs. There, between the geological extension of the Caspian towards the East, there is a strip of arable land, more or less wide, but very fertile. Now, to exploit it, a lot of ingenuity is needed: where, for example in Merv, a big river, such as the Marghab, coming from the glaciers of the central East-Iranian massif, crosses the chain, it is necessary to establish dams, above the strip of arable land, without which, the ‘river’, divided into several dozens of arms, rushes under the sands. Elsewhere, and it is almost all along the northern slope of the chain, one can create artificial oases, by bringing the water by underground aqueducts.” (p. 44)

The construction of dams and underground aqueducts are among the most interesting legacies of their (the ancient Persians) irrigation techniques (…) Long before Islam, the Persian hydrologists had built thousands of aqueducts, allowing the creation of hundreds of villages, dozens of cities previously unknown. And very often, even where there was a river, because of the insufficiency of this one, the hydronomists had brought to light many aqueducts allowing the extension of the culture and the development of the city. Naishabur was such a city. Under the Sassanids, and later under the Caliphs, an important network of aqueducts had been created there, so that the inhabitants could afford the luxury of owning a ‘’bathing room’ in the basement, at the level of the aqueduct serving the house.”

Water room of a qanat in the basement of the Water Museum in Yadz, Iran.

Let us recall that most Persian scholars, including the famous mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, not suffering from today’s hyper-specialization that tends to curb creative thinking, excelled in mathematics, geometry, astronomy and medicine as well as in hydrology.

Mazaheri confirms that this “civilization of underground waters” spread well beyond the Iranian borders:

“Already, under the [Umayyad] Caliph Hisham (723-42), Persian hydronomists built aqueducts between Damascus and Mecca (…) Later, Mecca suffering from lack of water, Zubayda, the wife of Hâroun Al-Rachîd, sent Persian hydronomists there who endowed the city with a large underground aqueduct. And each time the latter was silted up, a new team left Persia to restore the network: such repairs took place periodically under Al-Muqtadir (908-32), under Al-Qa’im (1031-1075), under Al-Naçir (1180-1226) and, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, under the Mongol prince Emir Tchoban. We would say the same of Medina and the stages on the pilgrimage route, between Baghdad and Mecca, wherever it was possible to do so, hydronomic works were undertaken and ‘underground aqueducts’ were created.

Hydronomy is a highly demanding skill. To practice it, it is not enough to have mathematical knowledge: decadal calculus, algebra, trigonometry, etc., it is necessary to spend long hours in the galleries at the risk of dying by flooding, landslide or lack of air. It is necessary to have an ancestral instinct of ‘dowser’.”

The annual rainfall in Iran is 273 mm, which is less than one third of the world’s average annual precipitation.

The temporal and spatial distribution of precipitation is not uniform; about 75% occurs in a small area, mainly on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea, while the rest of the country does not receive sufficient rainfall. On the temporal scale, only 25% of the precipitation occurs during the plant growing season.

7,7 x the circonférence of the Earth

Still in use today in Iran, qanâts currently supply about 7.6 billion m3 of water, close to 15% of the country’s total water needs.

Considering that the average length of each qanât is 6 km in most parts of the country, the total length of the 30,000 qanât systems (potentially exploitable today) is about 310,800 km, which is about 7.7 times the circumference of the Earth or 6/7th of the Earth-Moon distance!

This shows the enormous amount of work and energy applied to build the qanâts. In fact, while more than 38,000 qanâts were in operation in Iran till 1966, its number dropped to 20,000 in 1998 and is currently estimated at 18,000. According to the Iranian daily Tehran Times, historically, over 120,000 qanat sites are documented.

Moreover, while in 1965, 30-50% of Iran’s total water needs were met by qanats, this figure has dropped to 15% in recent decades.

According to the Face Iran website:

The water flow of qanâts is estimated between 500 and 750 cubic meters per second. As land aridity tends to vary according to the abundance of rains in each region, this quantity of water is used as a more or less important supplement. This makes it possible to use good land that would otherwise be barren. The importance of the impact on the desert can be summarized in one figure: about 3 million hectares. In seven centuries of hard work, the Dutch conquered 1.5 million hectares from the marshes or the sea. In three millennia, the Iranians have conquered twice as much on the desert.

Indeed, to each new qanât corresponded a new village, new lands. From where a new human group absorbed the demographic surplus. Little by little the Iranian landscape was constituted. At the end of the qanat, is the house of the chief, often with one floor. It is surrounded by the villagers’ houses, animal shelters, gardens and market gardens.

The distribution of land and the days of irrigation of the plots were regulated by the chief of the villages. Thus, a qanat imposed a solidarity between the inhabitants.”

If each qanât is “invented” and supervised by a mirab (dowser-hydrologist and discoverer), the realization of a qanât is a collective task that requires several months or years, even for medium-sized qanâts, not to mention works of record dimensions (a 300 m deep mother-well, a 70 km long gallery classified in 2016 as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, in northeast Iran).

Each undertaking is carried out by a village or a group of villages. The absolute necessity of a collective investment in the infrastructure and its maintenance requires a higher notion of the common good, an indispensable complement to the notion of private property that rains and rivers do not take in account.

In the Maghreb, the management of water distributed by a khettara (the local name for qanâts) follows traditional distribution norms called “water rights”. Originally, the volume of water granted per user was proportional to the work contributed to build the khettara, translated into an irrigation time during which the beneficiary had access to the entire flow of the khettara for his fields. Even today, when the khettara has not dried up, this rule of the right to water persists and a share can be sold or bought. Because it is also necessary to take into account the surface area of the fields to be irrigated by each family.

The causes of the decline of the qanâts are numerous. Without endorsing the catastrophist theses of an anti-human ecology, it must be noted that in the face of the increasing urban population, the random construction of dams and the digging of deep wells equipped with electric pumps have disturbed and often depleted the aquifers and water tables.

A neoliberal ideology, falsely described as “modern”, also prefers the individualistic “manager” of a well to a collective management organized among neighbors and villages. A passive State authority has done the rest. In the absence of more thoughtful reflection on its future, the age-old system of qanâts is on the verge of extinction as a result.

In the meantime, the Iranian population has grown from 40 to over 82 million in 40 years. Instead of living off oil, the country is seeking to prosper through agriculture and industry. As a result, the need for water has increased substantially. To cope with rising demands, Iran is desalinating sea water at great cost. Its civilian nuclear program will be the key factor to provide water at a reasonable cost.

Beyond political and religious divisions, closer cooperation between all the countries in the region (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, etc.) with a perspective to improve, develop, manage and share water resources, will be beneficial to each and all.

Presented as an “Oasis Plan” and promoted for decades by the American thinker and economist Lyndon LaRouche, such a policy, translating word into action, is the only basis of a true peace policy.

Bibliography :

  • Remy Boucharlat, The falaj or qanât, a polycentric and multi-period invention, ArcheOrient – Le Blog, September 2015 ;
  • Pierre Lombard, Du rythme naturel au rythme humain : vie et mort d’une technique traditionnelle, le qanat, Persée, 1991 ;
  • Aly Mazaheri, La civilisation des eaux cachées, un traité de l’exploitation des eaux souterraines composé en 1017 par l’hydrologue perse Mohammed Al-Karaji, Persée, 1973 ;
  • Hassan Ahmadi, Arash Malekian, Aliakbar Nazari Samani, The Qanat: A Living History in Iran, January 2010;
  • Evelyne Ferron, Egyptians, Persians and Romans: the interests and stakes of the development of Egyptian oasis environments.

NOTE:

[1] The ten cities forming the Decapolis were: 1) Damascus in Syria, much further north, sometimes considered an honorary member of the Decapolis; 2) Philadelphia (Amman in Jordan); 3) Rhaphana (Capitolias, Bayt Ras in Jordan); 4) Scythopolis (Baysan or Beit-Shean in Israel), which is said to be its capital; It is the only city west of the Jordan River; 5) Gadara (Umm Qeis in Jordan); 6) Hippos (Hippus or Sussita, in Israel); 7) Dion (Tell al-Ashari in Syria); 8) Pella (Tabaqat Fahil in Jordan); 9) Gerasa (Jerash in Jordan) and 10) Canatha (Qanawat in Syria)

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