The arch Freemason, Henry John Temple, or Lord Palmerston, as Foreign Secretary, made the trade agreement with China in 1842, which gave Britain control of Hong Kong.  Palmerston was also the author of the two British Opium Wars against China, which occurred bewteen1839-42 and 1856-60 respectively.

In 1773, the British East India Company had obtained in Bengal, India, a monopoly of the production and sale of opium.  The British East India Company was just another name for the British Establishment or British Government, whose own bank was the "Baring Brothers".

It was a British joint-stock company, formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the Mughals of India and the East Indies, and later with Qing China. The company ended up seizing control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent (and briefly Afghanistan), colonised parts of Southeast Asia, and colonised Hong Kong after the first Opium War.

The two most popular forms of opium were grown in "Patna" and "Benares" for distribution in China.  Keen-lung, the Emperor of China, had banned opium but the market remained with British traders/dope pushers shipping contraband up the Canton River to Whampoa where it was distributed.

The origins of the first Opium War can be traced to 31 December 1838 when Lin Zexu was appointed imperial commissioner to investigate and manage maritime affairs and deal with the opium problem in Canton.  The drug utterly ruined the minds and morals of the people, draining the country's wealth, with huge profits in silver going to the merchants.

On 24 March 1839, Lin Zexu blockaded foreign factories, forcing foreign merchants to surrender their opium stocks to be destroyed.  During June 1839, the Chinese commissioner ordered the seizure and destruction of 20,283 chests of opium worth $12 million belonging to British "traders" in Canton.  Then on 4 September 1839, British naval forces fired the first shots in the as yet undeclared Opium War.  This was occasioned by the evacuation of British drug dealers from Canton, the destruction of confiscated opium, the stoppage of foreign trade, and the denial of food and water to British subjects.  Forcing China to buy Indian cultivated opium lay at the heart of the problem, which was exacerbated by the whole question of the opening up of China to the West.

The formal beginning of the Opium War was not declared until June 1840.  Relations worsened the following month when the British refused to hand over sailors who killed a Chinese peasant in a mindless brawl.  On 30 May 1841, a massive force of rural Chinese dwellers attacked British forces near the village of Sanyuanli, just north of Canton, incensed by the behaviour of British troops who had been raping the local women and violating graves.

But time proved that the Chinese had no answers to the firepower of the British guns and rockets.  The British crushed the technologically inferior Chinese defences and the first Opium War was concluded.  On 29 August 1842, the Treaty of Nanjing (or Peking) was signed in Britain's favour in terms that totally humiliated the Chinese.  Thereafter, India-grown opium poured into china through Canton and Hong Kong in greater quantities than it did even prior to 1840, with tens of millions of Chinese becoming addicts and the wealth of the nation drained in the process.

As well as the island of Hong Kong being ceded "in perpetuity to Her Britannic Majesty, her heirs and successors", the ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningbo and Shanghai were to be opened up to British "free trade".  Britain was also to have consular rights in these ports, and the Chinese were to pay over a period of four years massive "reparations" amounting to $21 million to cover the costs incurred by the British in waging war and in lost opium revenues.  Curiously, nothing was mentioned in the Treaty about the opium trade, but "free trade" in Britain's eyes amounted to carte blanche to trade in dope.  Yet the Chinese Emperor, Keen-lung, had declared opium illegal before 1773, which was iterated in 1796 by emperor Kea-king, reiterated by emperor Taou-Kiwang in 1834, and re-reiterated, unavailingly, on 1st December 1843 by the same emperor.

Britain's East India Company was anxious not to jeopardise its legal trade in tea so it started auctioning its Indian opium in Calcutta to what was supposedly private traders.  The drug was then shipped in specially built and heavily armed opium clippers.  Unloaded onto fortified receiving-ships moored off the southern coast of China the illicit cargoes were then transported to multi-oared "fast-crabs" and "scrambling dragons" crewed by fierce Chinese pirates.  The opium was then hastened past bribed officials to be fed into the smugglers' networks  run by gangsters and secret societies like the Triads.  Commissioner Lin Zexu even wrote to Queen Victoria demanding that she ban the illegal trade, emphasising: "It is repugnant to human feeling and at variance with the Way to Heaven."  The plea was to no avail: the trade continued unabated.

The Taiping rebels emerged from the destruction of southern China wrought by the first Opium War.  Lord Palmerston's Britain, together with his allies in the United states, who were in the process of forming the Confederacy, played the Taiping rebels against the Peking Government (1851-64) to both achieve genocidal population reduction in China and to force the Chinese to open up the heart of the country to "free trade", especially to opium.

The British Foreign Office, together with the Caleb Cushing  (of the opium-trading Cushing family) faction of the pre-Confederacy forces in the United States, and a faction of the Protestant missionary community in their employ, can be credited with responsibility for the Taiping Rebellion.  There were certainly some well-meaning Protestant missionaries in China, but the missionary community was also the structure through which some of the greatest evil of British colonial policy was imposed and enforced.

The leader of the Taiping rebels, Hong Xiuquan, was deeply influenced by Protestant missionaries, and was passionately dedicated to his belief that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ.  with the nation's wealth decimated by the exacting conditions of the Treaty of Nanjing, it was relatively simple for Hong Xiuquan to find zealous disciples among the disaffected masses.  So China was left in a state of disorder by what was one of the greatest holocausts in history and the largest and most devastating peasants' revolt in Chinese history outside the Maoist revolt in the 20th century.  Between 20 and 30 million people were killed in the period of the Taiping rebellion between 1851 and 1864.

The rebellion was favourable to Britain as it kept China unstable at an important time in history when trading deals were being struck and China was forced to surrender territory.  It was also in Britain's interests that the Taiping rebels did not ultimately win the rebellion, so punitive military measures were taken against them from time to time to keep them within manageable constraints.

Palmerston was at the helm of British politics in every year of this revolt save the first two, at which time he was still at the forefront of British foreign policy.  Overall, China's loss of population, taking into account both the death toll and the breakdown of the nation's capacity to support and expand population growth, is estimated to approach 100 million.

The 8th Earl of Elgin, the son of the Lord Elgin who procured the "Elgin Marbles" from Greece, went to China in 1857 and eventually made the Treaty of Tientsin in June 1858.  Lord Elgin later arranged with Japan to open its ports to British ships.  This was a preparatory measure with ulterior motives in mind that would allow the British a nearby base to launch impending attacks on China.  recent history indicated that the Chinese would not accept humiliatory conditions for long.  It also indicated that the greedy British would never be happy with their lot, knowing that they could eke out an even better agreement with their much superior military power.

Presently, on 25 June 1859, British and French warships attacked the Dagu forts in China, but were defeated by the Chinese garrison.  The naval forces of the Masonic British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, and the Masonic French Emperor, Napoleon III were saved by the timely intervention of the naval forces of the United States, which conveniently just happened to be in the area at the time.  Lord Palmerston's French Masonic brother was not enough to save the day, but his Masonic brother from across the pond, James Buchanan, the US President, certainly was. LINK

By 6 October 1860, Lord Elgin was back in China with a Franco-British expeditionary force - an army of looters - and captured Peking.  The Chinese Emperor, Hieng-fung, fled and left behind all his treasure.  The Franco-British troops then looted the fabulous Summer Palace of the emperor.  Rarely had an army captured a prize so big.  There were so much riches that the British and French envoys, Lord Elgin and Baron Gros, had to appoint commissioners from each army to "divvy up" the spoils equally.

The 200 richly furnished buildings were plundered by the troops.  they staggered out the palace, arms laden with silks and brocades and their pockets stuffed with jewels.  Furniture was smashed up to get at jewels set in the woodwork.  Sacks were filled with snuffboxes, pearl necklaces and golden table sets.  One officer walked off with a priceless black jade set chess set while Lord Elgin stole the emperor's jade baton for Queen Victoria.  A similar one was nicked for Napoleon III.  what Elgin and Gros pillaged for personal keepsakes is nobody's business.  And how much of the booty helped to finance the British Confederate effort to try and carve up the United States in Britain's favour the following year is anybody's guess.

Exactly two weeks later, happy with the vast riches that were looted, Lord Elgin ordered the burning of the summer Palace.  This would ensure that no one could ever put a finger on the extent of the robbery, on what was appropriated and what remained among the ashes.

On 24 October 1860, Lord Elgin, escorted by British soldiers, marched through the deserted Chinese capital where 500 mandarins, led by Prince Gong, the half-brother of Emperor Hieng-fung met him. The defeated Chinese, daunted by the burning of the Summer Palace, signed a treaty in the Hall of Rites, acceding to Britain's demands. The terms were similar to those signed at Tientsin two years earlier.  It was the breaking of that Treaty, when the Chinese justifiably refused to allow foreign diplomats (spies) to establish embassies (Temples' Masonic temples) in Peking, which led to the Anglo-French occupation of the capital.  Under the terms of the treaty eleven more ports, including Shanghai, the gateway to the Yangzi, were to be opened to foreign trade; that is, the East India Company's drug barons.  Diplomats (Masonic spies) were to be allowed to live in Peking.  China also had to pay an indemnity and concede part of Kowloon to Britain.

One of the most important concessions demanded by the British in the treaties after the Opium Wars was the right of missionaries to work freely in the interior of the country.  Since missionaries had more freedom to operate than merchants, many of them were strictly political or merchant operatives wearing collars.  The secret services' operatives use the same methods today, concealed among all sorts of humanitarian workers, including the Red Cross.

As early as 1840, during the first Opium War, a young 31-year old William Ewart Gladstone argued in the House of Commons: "A war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know.  The British flag is hoisted with an infamous traffic."  Gladstone became Prime Minister for the first of his four administrations 28 years after this futile speech.  A considerable section of the landowning gentry at that time did not depend on paid agents in parliament to look after their interests, as they were themselves MPs, therefore were also directly privy to the engine room of the British oligarchy.

Which brings us back to Henry John Temple.  The high-handed dictatorial attitude of Viscount Palmerston and his diplomatic bluff of "hail-fellow-well-met" methods, typical of English "gentlemen", frequently endangered peace in Europe and elsewhere.  And given his belief that "half-barbarian countries such as China needed a dressing down every ten years or so", war usually became inevitable.  Of course, the Chinese regarded the British as barbarians, with justification, if the evidence of their own experiences was anything to go by.  The Chinese had attained a respectable degree of civilisation by the year 2200 BC, long before those who looted them in 1860, the real barbarians,  did.  With this in mind, will the Chinese ever be able to forgive or trust the British?  Can we blame them if they never do?

That homily by Gladstone in the Commons must have appeared quite profound 83 years later when in 1923 the British-run opium black market was perceived so seriously an international problem that United States Congressman, Stephen Porter, chairman of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced and passed a bill through Congress calling for country by country production and import quotas to be set on opium that would reduce consumption to approximately 10 per cent of the current levels of medical consumption.

Porter's proposal was brought before the League of Nations Opium Committee where the British representative publicly opposed it.  The British delegate drafted an amendment to Porter's plan, calling for increased quotas to account for "legitimate opium consumption" beyond the medical usage.  This referred to the huge addicted population in British colonies and spheres of influence [predominantly in Asia) where no regulations restricted opium use.  The enraged US and Chinese delegations led a walkout of the plenipotentiary session.  The British rubberstamped the creation of a Central Narcotics Board designated with authority to gather information and nothing more.  The journalists stationed in Geneva henceforth referred to what remained of the committee as the "Smugglers Reunion".

Nothing seems to have changed since the lamentable days of Brothers Elgin and Palmerston - the Douchebags of Dingleberry.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *