Silver may buy drugs now, however this is not about 2019, but a time beginning over a hundred years ago. It concerned China during the Qing Dynasty, which ran from the mid 1800’s to 1911. 72 years earlier, in 1839, what is known as “The Opium War” began. Before that war started, Chinese porcelains and silks were in high demand in the West. However the West’s products, from Britain, the U.S. and others, were not in great demand in China, resulting in a large trade imbalance. This resulted in huge amounts of silver flowing into China from the West, since silver was the only currency China would accept for goods they shipped to the West. Paper money was not acceptable. To counteract the silver outflow from the West into China, and since there was then a world-wide shortage of silver anyway, the West tried to find a way to keep trade continuing by using something other than silver for purchases from China.
British and American traders discovered that opium from India was highly addictive, and greatly desired in China. India was controlled by the East India Company, which was before England took control of India in 1858. India became a prime target for British and American traders to buy opium cheaply from India, and use it as money to buy China’s porcelain and silk. Opium was destructive to the Chinese people, and so much so, that the Chinese government under the Qing Dynasty banned the importation of opium, and in 1813, smoking of opium was made illegal in China. Addictive drugs had taken hold of China, and in spite of opium’s illegality, 40,000 chests of it were shipped into China from 1810 to 1838. Silver then reversed its course and flowed out of China to finance the population’s addiction, and by the late 1830’s, nine million ounces of silver had left China for the West.
To stop the illegal flow of opium into China, “The Opium War” broke out, with Britain defeating China in 1842, resulting among other things, China giving control of Hong Kong to the British. But this was not the end. Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, not only the Brits, but the Japanese took great advantage of a weakened China. There was a second opium war from 1856 to 1860, and then the Sino-Japanese War. That war has been likened to a “Forgotten Holocaust.” The Japanese landed in Shanghai, looted it, raped its females and proceeded to Nanking, where the ‘Rape of Nanking’ occurred in 1937, with 300,000 slain, and 80,000 women brutally raped. That war cost China, it is estimated, 20 million dead, equal to the Holocaust in WW II. The Japanese continued their brutality in WW II, and I still refuse to buy anything Japanese. A citizen revolt and uprising in 1900, came to be called the “Boxer Rebellion,” so named because there was a group of Chinese citizens who practiced martial arts, and they became known as “Boxers.” That rebellion made China even more destitute, and the Qing Dynasty collapsed. Japan’s invasion of China, and its brutal control, didn’t end until its defeat in WW II. By the 1920’s, there were two competing parties in China, the Kuomintang, which eventually came under Chaing Kai-shek’s rule, and the Chinese Communist Party came under Mao Zedong or ‘Chairman Mao.’ Chaing Kai-shek lost, and he moved his nationalists to Taiwan, where they still live, while China is trying to unify them as one nation. The Communists still rule China, as we all know, and they have met their match in Donald Trump. Obviously, silver can and always has been used as real money, even to buy opium a hundred years ago in China. Better get some, as they make fine Christmas gifts. Hope your Thanksgiving was a happy one!
-Don Stott
don@coloradogold.com