Episode 1 of 1
1810 American Opium Trade Share in Canton
- When
- 1810
- Where
- Canton
In 1810, American merchants held approximately 10% of the opium trade in Canton, selling Turkish opium despite Chinese prohibitions.
American merchants entered the opium trade with less expensive but inferior Turkish opium. By 1810, they had around 10% of the trade in Canton. The illegal sale of opium later became one of the world's most valuable single commodity trades, and between 1814 and 1850 it drew out 11 percent of China's money supply.
Sources
- History of opium in China Wikipedia
- Opium Wikipedia, revision of 2026-10-01
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.