You may not want to spend too many years of your life here, but as you see it in the early 1830s, Canton hardly seems the kind of place to start a war.

The entire formal trade of Europe and America with China, the largest empire in existence, goes on here in a space of just twelve acres — less, some like to point out, than the footprint of one of the pyramids in Egypt. You may not want to spend too many years of your life here, but as you see it in the early 1830s, Canton hardly seems the kind of place to start a war. 

No event casts a longer shadow over China’s modern history than the Opium War. Sparked by an explosive series of events that took place in the Canton factory compound in 1839, the war would end in 1842 with China’s humiliating defeat and a treaty all but dictated by the British aggressors, setting a disastrous pattern for the century to come. Textbooks in China on “modern” history, as a rule, take the Opium War as their starting point, the moment when China left its traditional past behind and was dragged forcibly into the world of European imperialism. The war occupies that place not because it was so destructive; in fact, it was relatively small and contained. It caused none of the large-scale social dislocation that China’s major internal wars of the nineteenth century like the Taiping Rebellion did. It did not topple the ruling dynasty or even remotely threaten to do so. There weren’t even that many battles fought.

But the symbolic power of the Opium War if almost limitless. It has long stood as the point where China's weakness was laid bare before the world, the opening of a "Century of Humiliation".

S. R. Platt, Imperial Twilight (2018), xxi-xxii