This was booty seized during the opium wars and then the Boxer uprising of 1900.
Russia took the region 140 years ago while China was too busy fighting the Opium Wars to object.
But the Opium Wars are always there, lurking in the Chinese subconscious, perpetuating the tension between pride and victimhood.
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More importantly, she explains how China has turned the Opium Wars into a founding myth of its struggle for modernity.
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Hong Kong was a British colony that was the spoils of its military victory in the Opium Wars of the mid-1800s.
Mr. Johnson writes about China's traditional policy to "export the maximum and import the minimum, " which led to the Opium Wars.
Ultimately, Britain fought a series of wars, which became known as the Opium Wars, in order to force China to allow its sale.
In 2006, for example, China's government shut down a leading liberal weekly over an article that challenged national orthodoxy on the Opium Wars.
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At the time, Shanghai was divided into three parts: the Chinese city, the British-led International Settlement and the French Concession, the latter two legacies of the Opium Wars in the 19th century.
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The house sits in a back alley of an area called the French Concession, which was conceded to the French government in 1842, after the Opium Wars, and held by the French until 1943.
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People know the horrific history of the Opium Wars (a war that was fought to allow the British to continue drug trafficking), the subsequent colonization of Hong Kong, and the atrocities of the Rape of Nanking.
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" A section seems to blame Christians for everything from the Opium Wars to abetting the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s -- which prompted the Vatican news agency to brand it a "distortion of the truth.
Britain had fought two wars in favour of the opium trade in the 19th Century, crushing Chinese efforts to restrict its importation.
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