The plan was quite simple - tea. Britain wanted tea, but self sufficient China wanted nothing but silver coins for it. So the trade in was silver for opium from colonial India. Then silver was used to buy tea. There is a great book For all the tea of China based on a diary of a British botanist who was commissioned by the Crown to smuggle tea plants out of China to develop cultivation and tea production in India.
And since then, upper class English people will offer China or India tea?
What happened at the coal-face, so to speak, was that the CHinese were self-suffiient in their domain. The brits wanted the tea, as you said. But to balance the trade, the Brits wanted to sell some of their products. The Chinese, however, viewed the crockery from the English industrial revolution, as crude and mis-shapen. To wit, buying Chinese table-ware even today, on Temu, will get you some wonderful creations.
Similarly, the Brits tried to sell their wonderful woollen products - tweed, and tartan etc., and found that the chinese market simply prefers silk beause it is lighter and warmer. that's changing 200 years later- tweed is quite fashionable there now. But still, it took that long.
Basically, the trade delegations to China were told: pay in silver. And this enfuriated the Brits. So they thought of a product that would definitely sell - even as it was illegal.
The plan was quite simple - tea. Britain wanted tea, but self sufficient China wanted nothing but silver coins for it. So the trade in was silver for opium from colonial India. Then silver was used to buy tea. There is a great book For all the tea of China based on a diary of a British botanist who was commissioned by the Crown to smuggle tea plants out of China to develop cultivation and tea production in India.
And since then, upper class English people will offer China or India tea?
What happened at the coal-face, so to speak, was that the CHinese were self-suffiient in their domain. The brits wanted the tea, as you said. But to balance the trade, the Brits wanted to sell some of their products. The Chinese, however, viewed the crockery from the English industrial revolution, as crude and mis-shapen. To wit, buying Chinese table-ware even today, on Temu, will get you some wonderful creations.
Similarly, the Brits tried to sell their wonderful woollen products - tweed, and tartan etc., and found that the chinese market simply prefers silk beause it is lighter and warmer. that's changing 200 years later- tweed is quite fashionable there now. But still, it took that long.
Basically, the trade delegations to China were told: pay in silver. And this enfuriated the Brits. So they thought of a product that would definitely sell - even as it was illegal.