9781422285824

sion bridges. Europeans later adapted many of these inventions for their own use, including gunpowder, which they used in weapons. Gradually China’s isolation waned as the West sought to exploit this mys- terious country for its riches. By the nineteenth century, British merchants wanted to open China to foreign trade in order to continue the export of opium, a powerful drug used widely in China for its capacity to ease pain and relax the mind. Westerners in Britain and elsewhere had

Signing the Treaty of Tientsin, 1858, marking an interlude in the Second OpiumWar.

a huge appetite for the narcotic . The result was the OpiumWars—the first from 1839 to 1842 and the second from 1856 to 1860—which forced China’s rulers to sign treaties opening the country’s ports to foreign trade vessels. THE BOXERS In 1898, a group of Chinese peasants known as the “Righteous and Harmonious Fists,” or Boxers, tried to throw the Europeans out of China. They massacred Christian missionaries and killed foreign officials. In response, Great Britain, Russia, France, Italy, Japan, and even the United States sent soldiers to put the Boxer Rebellion down. It didn’t take long for the Western colonial powers, along with Japan, to carve China into “spheres of influence.” By the early 1900s, China’s impe- rial system had mostly collapsed in Mongolia, Tibet, and other vassal states, which declared themselves no longer tied to the central government. The most advanced civilization in world history then degenerated into war- ring factions along ethnic and cultural lines. Some, such as China’s president Sun Yat-sen, believed Chinese culture had to be revived or the nation would die. When he came to power in 1911, Sun Yat-sen abolished China’s monarchy and feudal system and established the Republic of China. He guided his coun- try down the road of modernization.

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CHAPTER ONE: HISTORY, RELIGION, AND TRADITION