Opium and Cherry Blossoms
The days blurred together—I couldn’t tell whether the sun or the moon was rising outside. The factory was nearing completion, and I’d passed on most of the recipe. After Myeong-hyung’s team pulled out, I contacted the siblings in Changwon the next day and told them to come to Haman. Then a problem surfaced: there was no place for them to stay.
So I bought a container-style prefabricated building without hesitation. Of course, I had no connections of my own. When I mentioned it to Myeong-hyung, he arranged one immediately. He said it was something an old farm had been using and was going cheap. I paid on the spot. The next day it arrived on a five-ton truck. Including forklift unloading and moving fees, I settled the bill at twenty-five million won. Myeong-hyung worked fast. He even asked if living there would be all right. The question felt a little like a power play, but given their physical limitations, commuting back and forth would have been brutal, so I told them to just stay. No objections.
After showing them around, I gave my first order: make a company signboard. Use the siblings’ names and call it Minhee Chemical. Good cover, right? Publicly, I instructed them to pose as a shampoo factory. Nothing elaborate—just assembling plastic caps and pumps. Stack a few boxes outside for the illusion. Anyone who stepped inside would see through it immediately, but from the street it should look like a small home workshop where a disabled brother and sister were doing subcontracting work.
I was still a little uneasy, so I was preparing to issue orders through CCTV when the younger sister started checking messages on her phone and began directing her brother, one instruction at a time. As expected, my eye for people hadn’t failed me. She had a good sense for it; the two of them quickly made the place feel like a genuine sibling-run operation. The signboard was printed on a cheap plastic panel—exactly the kind of thing that screamed “no money spent here.” Near the entrance they’d somehow acquired a pallet and stacked yellow plastic crates on it, the kind farms use for produce. We spent three days on setup before moving into actual recipe training.
First, they had to memorize the recipe. I made the sister do the memorizing. Then I walked them through the workflow and safety precautions. Remote instruction was painful. Things that would have taken a minute if I’d just shown them in person dragged on while they stumbled and misunderstood. Finally came the most important part: safety training.
The recipe Nakamura had given us contained small amounts of toxic substances—ammonia, acetic acid, and the like. Direct inhalation could cause serious, lasting damage. Looking at the manufacturing steps, I still couldn’t understand why anyone would make this stuff. One odd detail stood out: it called for a synthetic fragrance. Cherry blossom scent. Japanese taste, maybe?
Once Eun-seong and the siblings received their first month’s pay, I returned to Noryangjin.
“Choi Eunsu-seonsaengnim~”
“Yes~”
I joined the familiar grandmothers and grandfathers, along with a few surly-looking young people, for class. Today’s subject was history. The GED curriculum included Korean history, and world history questions occasionally appeared. The teacher usually told us to skip those—“Better to spend the time on Korean instead”—but the topic interested me, so I paid close attention anyway.
The Opium Wars. Occupational hazard, I suppose.
In the nineteenth century, Britain exported woolens and cotton to the Qing dynasty while importing tea, silk, and porcelain from China. They bought especially large quantities of tea, and the Qing accepted silver in payment. Smart business on China’s part—trade only works when both sides have something to give and receive.
Then the teacher said something that made the imbalance obvious.
“As a result, enormous amounts of British silver flowed into the Qing, and Britain suffered heavy losses in its trade with China.”
So one side was simply selling everything and taking all the money. Couldn’t Britain have just printed more currency, or, from an economic standpoint, imposed tariffs or quotas?
The next part showed how little I understood the era.
“At the time, the Qing restricted trade with Britain. Only the port of Guangzhou was open, and only merchants licensed by the government could conduct business with the West.”
“China disliked Western culture entering the country and had no need for Western imports.”
“The Qing was self-sufficient; it could grow and manufacture everything it required within its own borders.”
Of course. Even back then, the continent carried itself differently. That famous ideology—Sinocentrism. The great-power-first mindset.
“When Britain continued losing money on trade with the Qing, it asked for more regions where it could sell goods. The Qing refused.”
Reasonable request from Britain’s perspective.
“While trying to figure out how to offset the trade deficit, Britain remembered that the Qing imported opium for medicinal use.”
“After that, Britain began selling opium into the Chinese market behind the Qing government’s back.”
Bastards.
“Once British opium started flooding in, the number of addicts in the Qing grew rapidly.”
They must have made a fortune. The teacher confirmed my thought.
“Britain earned huge sums from opium exports. Eventually, the amount of opium China imported exceeded the amount of tea Britain imported.”
Drugs really are a high-value industry. Even today the media calls pharmaceuticals a high-value-added sector and advertises them nonstop.
“The Qing banned opium imports and sent a special commissioner, Lin Zexu, to Guangzhou.”
“Lin confiscated opium from British merchants in Guangzhou and burned it.”
“Britain used the incident as a pretext to attack the Qing in June 1840.”
“The Qing lacked the strength to resist Britain. Local officials were corrupt, and the central government was in disarray.”
“The British navy seized control of the coast and threatened the Qing.”
“Finally, in August 1842, the Qing surrendered and signed the Treaty of Nanjing.”
“Under the treaty, Britain gained the right to trade freely in five Qing ports and obtained sovereignty over Hong Kong Island.”
So that was when Hong Kong became a colony.
“The Treaty of Nanjing was the first modern treaty the Qing signed with a foreign power. However, it was an unequal treaty heavily favoring Britain.”
All the great powers behaved that way back then. So drug dealing really did start with the strong nations.
“Britain won the First Opium War but didn’t gain much profit from it. Why? They took reparations and everything else they could squeeze out.”
“British goods still weren’t popular in the Qing.”
Guess it wasn’t just their food that didn’t sell.
“Britain then demanded that the Qing legalize the opium trade and open more northern cities.”
“The Qing refused, so Britain decided to start another war.”
They really didn’t know when to quit. Our teacher explained it all very clearly.
“Around that time, the Arrow Incident occurred.”
On October 8, 1856, a Qing official boarded the British ship Arrow in Guangzhou and arrested Chinese criminals. Britain claimed the official had forcibly lowered the British flag during the arrest and demanded a formal apology. Our Sinocentrism-armed official naturally refused.
“When the Qing refused to apologize, Britain used the incident as an excuse to declare war.”
“France joined as well, citing the execution of one of its missionaries in China.”
Why France all of a sudden? Weren’t Britain and France already splitting the profits? If two great powers teamed up, the Qing was finished.
“In 1858, Britain and France tried to force the defeated Qing to sign the Treaty of Tianjin.”
“It demanded the opening of more cities, guarantees for Christian missionary activities, and permission for British and French warships to navigate the Yangtze River and other ports.”
“When the Qing rejected the terms, British and French allied forces occupied Beijing in 1860.”
“They then concluded the Convention of Beijing. Under it, the Qing had to open even more cities than the Treaty of Tianjin required and cede the Kowloon Peninsula to Britain.”
What kind of backbone did the Qing think it had? This was a complete mess.
“Defeated in two Opium Wars, the Qing fell under the interference of multiple great powers—Britain, France, the United States, Russia, and Japan.”
“The Chinese people were crushed under the taxes needed to pay war reparations.”
Of course. When a country falls apart like that, ordinary citizens always suffer.
“This discontent sparked peasant uprisings and social reform movements across the Qing.”
“All of them failed. In the end, the Qing remained powerless until the Republic of China was established in 1912.”
“That’s all for today. The Opium Wars are so famous that I thought it worth covering even if they don’t appear on the exam.”
“Don’t bother memorizing dates. Just remember why the wars happened and that they were conflicts between China and the great powers. If something similar shows up on the test, you can guess.”
Teacher, what mattered to me wasn’t the GED—it was that my knowledge had expanded. Meanwhile, I had Eun-seong, who had just returned from Japan, deliver five drums to Haman. The contents were the drugs meant to be traded for silver.