Alice Loxton

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.

They're forced to open up more ports to trade to Britain.

And the eventual result of all of this is that tea starts to flow more easily and enable trade with Britain.

Now, following this, the Brits not only had they forced China to trade in this way, but they also wanted to take it a step further.

Instead of having to rely on China to trade the tea, they wanted to shortcut this and grow the tea.

tea themselves.

And so in India, they set up tea gardens and plantations.

The great problem was that they were lacking in some pretty key parts of this.

They lacked the knowledge, the know-how of how to grow the tea, but also the plants to do it.