The Myth of China

I'm reading the Opium Wars book and it upsets the Leftist/Communist myths. Opium was not introduced by British imperialists, it had been extensively used as an expensive medicine forever.  The Brits in India produced better quality and cheaper opium, and the Chinese bought it. See left. 

Manchu-occupied China was suffering severe financial stress, as silver was its sole currency - taxes and army salaries were paid in silver, and from 1805 the South American silver mines were exhausted and the continent was undergoing a generation of chaos (rebellion against the Spaniards and post-independence civil wars). The silver inflow from Mexican and Peruvian mines had stopped. In this situation, the Qin state fell into semi-paralysis and European iron gunboats encountered feeble resistance.

Chinese imports of Bombay opium were bleeding Chinese silver, collapsing the Manchu imperial state. The myth that British imperialists drugged impotent Chinese does not represent all the truth about China's collapse, because the Manchu regime was already in an advanced state of decomposition. The Manchu ruling conquerors were 0.3% of China's population. They ruled by terror and bureaucracy.

BTW, now I understand why the exam to be recruited into the bureaucracy - the eight-legged essay - was just a composition about a classical poem or saying. Literacy was the key skill of an efficient bureaucrat: the Chinese writing system was incredibly complicated, and all the business of the large Empire was done by detailed reports and letters.