For whatever accident in history, western nations came to rely more on the rule of law while China , despite having an extensive legal code early on, leaned more to the rule of man or of ethical behavior. This notion and the lack of ethical behavior on the part of the western powers, in this case notably the British, in the first major military engagement against China , the First Opium War of 1839-42, colored Chinese impressions of the west for decades to come. The First Opium War was not a continuous war, but a series of military engagements over several years that were often in response to incidents that of themselves were no casus belli ; but the opium trade was the background against which the development of the terms of trade evolved. As trade between China and Britain grew in the early-eighteenth century it became increasingly clear that the Chinese were correct: they had little interest in trade as there was little they wanted from the outside world. However, there was much the outside world wanted from them and thus the British very soon had a balance of payments problem. In possession of most of India they promoted the cultivation and use, for narcotic purposes, of opium. By the turn of the nineteenth century the British were exporting nearly 5,000 chests of opium per year to China . This amount quadrupled by the early 1830s, and silver was flowing very quickly out of China . It is worth noting that this trade was absolutely illegal; as early as 1800 the Chinese had banned domestic production and foreign importation of opium. This was drug-running on a scale that makes the present-day South American drug lords appear like small corner-shop merchants. One of China 's nineteenth-century heroes, Lin Zexu was dispatched to Guangzhou ( Canton ) to deal with the problem. He wrote an unimpeachable letter to Queen Victoria :

" We find your country is sixty or seventy thousand li [three li make one mile, ordinarily] from China Yet there are barbarian ships that strive to come here for trade for the purpose of making a great profit The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians. That is to say, the great profit made by barbarians is all taken from the rightful share of China . By what right do they then in return use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people? Even though the barbarians may not necessarily intend to do us harm, yet in coveting profit to an extreme, they have no regard for injuring others. Let us ask, where is your conscience? I have heard that the smoking of opium is very strictly forbidden by your country; that is because the harm caused by opium is clearly understood. Since it is not permitted to do harm to your own country, then even less should you let it be passed on to the harm of other countries -- how much less to China! Of all that China exports to foreign countries, there is not a single thing which is not beneficial to people: they are of benefit when eaten, or of benefit when used, or of benefit when resold: all are beneficial. “(1)

It is not known whether the Queen ever read the letter, however Lin's arguments carried some weight in England . For a time the British government looked aghast on the actions of their own merchants, yet when the British appointed a new Superintendent of Trade as a government officer, replacing the East India Company representative, that officer (with no control over the merchants) had to protect the integrity of the British crown. Events followed events and soon enough both sides realized that a military engagement was likely. The British blockaded Ningbo , a large port near Shanghai , and sailed to Tianjin , where they held negotiations with the Chinese. In January 1841 an agreement was reached, but in an indication of how far apart the two sides truly were, both the Chinese emperor and the British foreign secretary were furious with their representatives for not getting a better deal for their respective sides. A little over eighteen months later another treaty was signed; it was so unfair that Chinese people still smart over it. In addition to gifting Hong Kong and leasing the Kowloon peninsula to the British, the Treaty of Nanking stipulated the opening up of Shanghai and four other coastal ports for trade with rights to residency, and even provided Queen Victoria with financial restitution. Most significantly, this treaty included this article:

It is agreed that Her Britannic Majesty's Chief High Officer in China shall correspond with the Chinese High Officers, both at the capital and in the provinces. on a footing of perfect equality.

China 's entry to the rough and tumble of modern international diplomacy really begins here; as a general rule, until this point China had either regarded other countries as, at best, vassal states, or when threatened by a military prowess they could not counter, had tried to trade or bribe their way out. It would be another twenty years, a ruinous occupation of Beijing , which still rankles today, and the re-legalization of opium, before the Chinese formally instituted what was termed the Office for the Management of the Business of all Foreign Countries - their first true attempt at nation to nation diplomacy.

(1) From Ssuyu Teng and John Fairbank, China's Response to the West , (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), repr. in Mark A. Kishlansky, ed., Sources of World History , Volume II , (New York: HarperCollins CollegePublishers, 1995), pp. 266-69.