1838, Daoguang of Qing Dynasty sent Lin Zexu as an imperial envoy to Guangdong to ban opium. After Lin Zexu came to power, he seized more than 20,000 boxes of opium and destroyed them all at Humen Haikou.
After the British government knew about it, it used this as an excuse to send troops to invade China and launched the first Opium War. Finally, the Qing government officially signed the treaty of nanking, which started the modern history of China.
After the late Qing Dynasty, the provisional government of the Republic of China, the northern warlords, the national government and the semi-colonial and semi-feudal period, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the People's Republic of China (PRC) (PRC) was established in 1949, and the modern history of China ended.
Extended data:
The Opium War had a great influence on China. Politically, before the Opium War, China was an independent feudal country, and the Qing government exercised full sovereignty. After the Opium War, China's sovereignty over territory, territorial sea, justice, tariffs and trade began to be seriously damaged through unequal treaties.
Economically, before the Opium War, China was a self-sufficient feudal economy. After the Opium War, the western capitalist countries used the privilege of aggression to dump goods and plunder raw materials in China, which made China gradually involved in the world capitalist market and China's self-sufficient feudal economy gradually disintegrated.
China gradually changed from a feudal society to a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. With the change of China's social nature, the main contradiction in China society has changed from the contradiction between the landlord class and the peasant class to the contradiction between foreign capitalism and the Chinese nation, feudalism and the masses of the people. The contradiction between foreign capitalism and the Chinese nation has become the most important contradiction among various social contradictions.
Before the Opium War, the revolutionary task of the people of China was to oppose their own feudal rule. After the Opium War, the people of China shouldered the dual revolutionary task of opposing foreign capitalist aggression and domestic feudal rule. China has since entered the period of the old democratic revolution. The Opium War was a turning point in China's history and the beginning of China's modern history.
Baidu Encyclopedia-Modern History of China (Starting Event, Ending Event)