Alice Loxton

speaker

770 appearances 11 recordings 7 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 3 Sep

Alice Loxton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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You're Dead to Me · Why do British people love tea? (from Here For The History) · 19 Jun 2026 podcast

But there was a problem, because the Chinese would only accept silver in exchange for tea, and the East India Company did not have a

enough silver.

And the way that they dealt with this problem is rather looked down on today, shall we say, to put it politely.

Because what they did was they took opium, which was being produced in parts of East India, an area of the world that they controlled at that time, and they amped up the production massively.

So opium comes from poppies, it's massively addictive.

So the East India Company then sold this opium illegally to Chinese merchants in exchange for silver, which then allowed them to buy more tea to bring back to Britain.

And this did lead to a huge problem in China of opium addiction, which you can understand the emperor wasn't very happy about.

The opium wars, indeed.

So the emperor even writes to Queen Victoria in 1839.

He pleads for this trade of opium to cease.

He's met with silence.

And next he takes action.

He seizes 20,000 chests of opium and dumps it in the sea.

And the East India Company retaliates with great force.

Absolutely.

So the Royal Navy send in these warships, there's steamships towing gunboats that smash through China's river and coastal defences.

So China is forced to capitulate.

It's a great humiliation for them.

They end up having to pay for the loss of the opium.

They cede Hong Kong to Britain.

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