In 'Smoke and Ashes,' Amitav Ghosh draws comparisons between America's modern opioid crisis and the West's flooding of China with opium in the 18th century.

China was soundly defeated. Among other outcomes, it ceded the vast port city of Hong Kong to Britain at the end of the First Opium War. Hong Kong returned to China's dominion in 1997.

Blow to monarchy. China's last emperor, Puyi, abdicated in 1912 but held onto his royal title until 1924. The original Manchu name of the Qing house was Aisin Gioro, or "golden clan".

A key feature of China’s opium epidemic is that it was state-sponsored. In the early 19th century , British merchants wanted to sell Indian-grown opium in China, while Chinese officials ...

The Forbes House Museum in Milton is currently exhibiting "Opium: the Business of Addiction" detailing the South Shore's ties to China's opium crisis.

Dr. W. H. G. Aspland, General Secretary of the International Anti-Opium Association in Peking, says: “In two districts in South Fu-Kien the military authorities are planning to raise $15,000,000 ...

War on Drugs. Anti-Chinese Xenophobia Fueled America's First Drug War San Francisco's prohibitionists worried that opium dens were patronized by "young men and women of respectable parentage" as ...

China banned the importation of opium as early as 1729, for which reason the East India Company “could not formally or explicitly acknowledge that its opium was intended for the Chinese market.” ...

The First Opium War in 1839 — there were two — was, ironically enough, a dispute over the trade deficit. It involved Great Britain attacking China to force it to allow Western powers ...

During the 1910s, one tin of opium from China cost about $2.50 to produce, and the same tin smuggled into the United States sold for more than $120, according to a news article published by the ...

The relatively unknown story of wartime Japan’s ties with the opium trade in China is now in the public domain, courtesy of a manga series that has already sold more than 1.8 million copies in ...