参考译文
The Beginning of the Modern History of China
In 1840 Britain shamelessly launched a war on China for a criminal purpose - to protect their opium trade.
In the early nineteenth century, the British East India Company smuggled to China large quantities of opium produced in India, which was then a British colony. This illegal trade not only cost China enormous sums of money, but did great harm to the health and moral quality of those who were addicted to the drug. So clear-headed officials in the Qing government like Lin Zexu wanted to have the trade completely banned. The Qing rulers also saw the danger of the spread of opium, and in 1838 appointed Lin High Commissioner and entrusted him with the task of banning the opium trade in Guangzhou, where most British opium dealers were staying and doing business.
After arriving in Guangzhou early in 1839, Lin took resolute and strict measures to ban the trade. He compelled the British merchants to surrender all their opium, totaling 22, 000 chests (one chest containing about 120 jin of opium) and had it publicly burned in Humen, not far from Guangzhou.
The British government, urged by the interest groups connected with the opium trade, decided to wage war on China. They sent a fleet of over 4,0 battleships with 4,000 troops to Chinese seas.
The invaders were repelled by the army and people of Guangdong, where Lin Zexu had made necessary preparations. The decadent and corrupt Qing rulers were so frightened by the superior weapons of the British, and so afraid of the rise of the people, that they had wavered all along between fighting and suing for peace, and finally decided to accept the British demands so as to end the war. Lin Zexu was demoted and exiled to Xinjiang.
In August 1842, the Treaty of Nanjing, the first unequal treaty imposed on China by a Western power, was signed on board a British battleship anchored near Nanjing. The treaty stipulated that China should pay Britain an indemnity of 21,000,000 silver dollars, cede Hong Kong to Britain, open five ports (Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai) to foreign trade, and tariffs on British goods should be fixed by mutual agreement. In the following year Britain forced on China two new agreements, which allowed British consuls to try British people who had committed crimes in China according to British law, and made China give Britain all the privileges in trade that China would give to any other country. In other words, China gave Britain the right of consular jurisdiction and unilateral most-favoured-nation treatment.
China's defeat in the Opium War exposed her military weakness and political backwardness.
Western powers saw that it was easy to force her to accept unequal conditions. So after the war Britain and other Western countries, including France, Germany, Russia and the United States, and Japan in the east, jointly or separately started aggressive wars on China, or bullied China in different ways, to demand privileges, special rights, indemnities, concessions and even territory, and generally they got what they wanted. Chinese history in the second half of the nineteenth century was full of such humiliating events. They marked the turn of China from a feudal country into a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country.
