The Dragon Awakens

Date

September 26, 2018

Post by

Edul Kanga

Category

News

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For Parsi’s information – about the opium trade.

A Copyright compendium in limited circulation. ©

Formatted from various acknowledged original sources – By E. Kanga.

China Remembers – A vast crime by the West, on its People.

The Sassoon Monopoly on Opium – Still Fuels Chinese Resentment Today – [Part 1]

The 99 year British lease on Hong Kong expired in July, 1997, allowing China to take over its land once again. Hundreds of newspaper stories and TV reports covered that event but not one revealed how England first gained control of Hong Kong.

The truth lies buried in the family line of David Sassoon, “The Rothschilds of the Far East,” and their monopoly over the opium trade. Britain won Hong Kong by launching the ‘Opium Wars’ to give the Sassoons exclusive rights to drug an entire nation.

David Sassoon was born in Baghdad, Iran in 1792. His father, Saleh Sassoon, was a wealthy banker and the treasurer to Ahmet Pasha, the governor of Baghdad (Thus making him the “court Jew” – a highly influential position.)

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A description of David Sassoon – in the Fortune Magazine – US, 1930s.

In 1829 Ahmet was overthrown due to corruption and the Sassoon family fled to Bombay, India.

This was the strategic trade route to India’s interior and the gateway to the Far East. In a brief time the British government granted Sassoon, monopoly rights to all manufactured cotton goods, silk and most important of all – Opium – then the most addictive drug in the world.

· The Beginning of the Opium Trade.

In the beginning, David Sassoon wanted to trade cotton cloth with China in exchange for tea, but the Chinese did not want the cotton that Sassoon wanted to trade. At the same time, Britain had an insatiable appetite for Chinese tea, but the Qing Dynasty and its subjects did not want to buy anything that the British produced.

The Chinese were, however, willing to trade tea for silver, since at that time China had a currency fully backed by silver. But the government of Queen Victoria did not want to use up the country’s reserves of gold or silver in buying tea. However, Sassoon considered that the Chinese might be susceptible to opium, which could then be exchanged for tea.

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This is what made David Sassoon a billionnaire in the middle 1800’s – 160 years ago.

Armed with this knowledge, he sailed back to England to make a new proposition to the Queen. And, on the advice of David Sassoon, Queen Victoria decided to export opium from the Indian Subcontinent to China where her military would enforce its importation and use. In Order to boost the trade David Sassoon forced the farmers in Bengal to stop farming food and turn to growing opium poppies. The climate in Bengali was very good for growing opium and Sassoon’s business flourished. He became a member of the East India Company, a firm owned and run by Jews out of the City of London. So successful was the opium business that the tax the East Indian Company paid to England paid for all English wars between 1831 and 1905.

· Opium Was a “Jewish Business”

The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1905 states that Sassoon expanded his opium trade into China and Japan. He placed his eight sons in charge of the various major opium exchanges in China.

According to the 1944 Jewish Encyclopedia: “He employed only Jews in his business and wherever he sent them he built synagogues and schools for them. He imported whole families of fellow Jews . . . and put them to work.”

Sassoon’s sons were busy pushing this mind-destroying drug in Canton, China, and their trade expanded alarmingly. Between 1830 – 1831 they trafficked 18,956 chests of opium earning millions of dollars. Part of the profits went to Queen Victoria and the British government. In the year 1836 the trade increased to over 30,000 chests and drug addiction in coastal cities became endemic.

In 1864, the Sassoons imported 58,681 chests of opium which brought in over 20 million pounds. By 1880 it had skyrocketed to 105,508 chests, making the Sassoons the richest Jews in the world next to the Rothschilds.

The Sassoons were now licensing opium dens in each British occupied area with large fees being collected by their Jewish agents. And many of these Jewish agents were the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng. These Jews had immigrated to China along the Silk Road hundreds of years ago and had so inter-married with the Chinese that they looked entirely Chinese. But they still were practicing Jews and were thus the perfect Chinese agents for the Sassoon’s. The entire trade was controlled by Jewish families only. Sassoon would not allow any other race to engage in “the Jews’ business” of importing and selling opium.

Opium was strictly a Jewish monopoly, & these Jews were working with British passports.

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David Sassoon – China’s own original “Merchant of Death.”

The corrupt British monarchy honored them with privilege and knighthood – to the disgrace of the Crown. To this day the Sassoons are in the history books as “great developers” of India, but the source of their vast wealth is never mentioned – the destruction and impoverishment of the population of China.

According to a 1930s edition of Fortune Magazine (USA), the Sassoon Family monopolized more than 70% of the opium trade and controlled every nook and corner of opium traffic between India and China. This is also consistent with research and observations according to Edward LeFevour in “Western Enterprise in Late Ch’ing Dynasty China”. According to these sources, in the middle 1800s, the Sassoon group was acknowledged to be the major holder (70%+) of all opium stocks in India and in China.

The Sassoons were not the only Jews involved in the trade; much of the remaining 30% was shared with other Jewish families. There was Hartung (哈同) – who is listed as “the richest of the rich” after the Sassoons, Hardoon, Kadoorie, Arnold, Abraham, Ezra and Solomon, among others.

For the Sassoon’s profitable troubles, Queen Victoria rewarded them with Hong Kong and the New Territories as their import and distribution base. The time has come for the entire world to condemn the British colonial masters and these Jewish “merchants” for their evil crimes of forcing opium by the shiploads onto the Chinese.

By all accounts, the Jewish opium merchants did not take ‘NO’ for an answer, but instead used the violent power of the British military to kill all of the ‘uppity’ Chinese who dared to refuse the opium.

These were “command performances”, persisted in until addiction took over.

N.B. The stories we hear today of Bill Gates or Warren Buffett being “the richest man in the world” are just urban legends for the naive. The Rothschilds, the Sassoons and similar families today, are each worth an estimated 6 to 7 trillion dollars.

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 Chinese opium smokers – c.1900. Hulton Archive/Getty Image. Chinese forced at gunpoint to smoke opium.

· The Opium Wars – Euphemistically called “The Boxer Rebellion”

China’s government, not too surprisingly, objected to the large-scale importation of narcotics into their country by a foreign power, provoking Britain to declare war. In 1839, the Manchu Emperor ordered that it be stopped. He named the Commissioner of Canton, Lin Tse-hsu, to lead a campaign against opium. Lin seized 2,000 chests of Sassoon opium and threw it into the river. An outraged David Sassoon demanded that Great Britain retaliate. Because the Sassoon family had married into the Rothschild family who controlled the English economy, this demand had powerful Jewish backers in England.

Thus, the Opium Wars began with the British Army fighting as mercenaries of the Sassoon’s. They attacked cities and blockaded ports. The Chinese Army, decimated by 10 years of rampant opium addiction, proved no match for the British Army.

An enraged British PM – Palmerston said: “We shall teach such a lesson to these perfidious hordes, that the name of Europe will hereafter be a passport of fear.”

The war ended in 1839 with the signing of “The Treaty of Nanking.” This included provisions especially designed to guarantee the Sassoons the right to enslave an entire population with opium. The “peace treaty” included these provisions:

· Full legalization of the opium trade in China.

· Compensation from the opium stockpiles confiscated by Lin of 2 million pounds.

· Territorial sovereignty for the British Crown over several designated offshore islands.

· The Sassoons use the British Army to Drug an Entire Nation

British Prime Minister Palmerston wrote to Crown Commissioner Captain Charles Elliot that the treaty didn’t go far enough. He said it should have been rejected out of hand because: “After all, our naval power is so strong that we can tell the Emperor what we mean to hold rather than what he would cede. We must demand the admission of opium into China’s interior as an article of lawful commerce and increase the indemnity payments and the British access to several additional Chinese ports.” Thus, China not only had to pay Sassoon the cost of his dumped opium, but reimburse England an unheard sum of 21 million pounds for the cost of the war! This gave the Sassoon’s monopoly rights to distribute opium in port cities. However, even this was not good enough and Sassoon demanded the right to sell opium throughout the nation. The Manchu’s resisted and the British Army again attacked in the Second Opium War fought 1858 -1860. Palmerston declared that all of interior China must be open for uninterrupted opium traffic. The British suffered a defeat at the Taku Forts in June 1859 when sailors, ordered to seize the forts, were run aground in the mud-choked harbour. Several hundred were killed or captured.

· The Destruction of the Yuan Ming Yuan

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Photo taken by Ernst Ohlmer in 1873. One of the earliest photos of the YuanMningYuan.

In October, the British besieged Peking. When the city fell, British commander Lord Elgin, ordered the temples and other sacred shrines in the city sacked and burned to the ground as a show of Britain’s absolute contempt for the Chinese.

In early October of 1860, the commanders of the British and French forces held a conference outside the gates of the ‘Yuan Ming Yuan’ – the ‘Garden of Perfect Brightness.’

It was situated on the western outskirts of Beijing, where they agreed to share whatever they could loot and to destroy the balance.

As the primary residence of five Qing emperors, YuanMingYuan contained hundreds of palaces, temples, libraries, theaters, pavilions, chapels, gazebos and galleries filled with priceless artworks, antiquities and personal possessions.

There followed an orgy of indiscriminate plunder in which anything that could not be carted off was destroyed.
On Oct. 18, British forces were ordered by Lord Elgin – son of the Lord Elgin who removed the marble friezes from Greece’s Parthenon – to inflict a final blow, with fire, as revenge for the Chinese refusal to permit the importation of opium that was devastating their country, though ostensibly for the deaths of some British and Indian prisoners in Chinese captivity. . . Because YuanMingYuan was so vast – roughly five times the size of Beijing’s Forbidden City and eight times that of Vatican Cityit took an entire infantry division of nearly 4,500 men, including four British regiments and the 15th Punjabi, many weeks to set it aflame and finally render it to utter destruction. Gilded beams crashed, porcelain roofs buckled and ash filled the lakes, as so many embers snowed down on Beijing that the entire city seemed on fire, and where the clouds of smoke were so dense, they eclipsed the sun.

. Upon hearing the news, the ailing 30-year-old Xianfeng emperor vomited blood; less than a year later he was dead. “It was a sacrifice of all that was most ancient and most beautiful,” acknowledged Robert McGhee, chaplain to the British forces and a participant in, and defender of, the destruction. . . . . “It is gone, but I do not know how to tear myself from it. Arguably the greatest concentration of historic treasures in the world, dating and representing a full 5,000 years of an ancient civilization, were either looted or totally destroyed.” And all of this was done to protect ‘exclusive opium concessions’ granted to the Jewish Sassoons of UK & the revenue they generated for the crown.

The YuanMingYuan’s desecration is an unforgettable shame in the hearts of the Chinese people. A reminder for the world, that such destruction of human cultural heritage should not happen again.

You can read more on the: The Wanton Destruction of China’s Yuan Ming Yuan. à (pgs. 10-16)

· The British and Jewish “Peace Treaties” and the Origin of British Hong Kong

In the new “Peace Treaty” of Oct.25, 1860, the Sassoons (backed by the force of the British military) were assigned rights to a vastly expanded opium trade covering seven-eights of China. England took not only the Hong Kong peninsula as a colony but also large sections of Amoy, Canton, Foochow, Ningbo and Shanghai.

Hong Kong (as a colony) was founded by the British specifically for a life of crime. When Britain gave the Jewish Sassoon family the exclusive franchise to distribute opium in China, the family needed a base of operations for the importing, processing, packaging and distribution. Hong Kong was forcibly “leased” solely for the Sassoon family’s opium business.

This was the bloody origin of Hong Kong’s 155 years as a British colony. Readers may not be generally aware of the behind-the-scenes negotiations in London that preceded the return of Hong Kong to China. The “Iron Lady” (perhaps referring to the chastity belt, and perhaps not) Margaret Thatcher, decided at the last minute she wasn’t returning Hong Kong to anybody. The word is that her ministers panicked & browbeat her into concession, for fear of starting World War III.

And for sure it might have done. After all of the past humiliation, there is no way China would have accepted a betrayal or default on that agreement. The Chinese government later admitted it would have just moved in with troops and taken Hong Kong back. And you couldn’t blame them.

· The Origin of British Hong Kong Banking

After the British established Hong Kong as a colony in the aftermath of the Opium Wars, local merchants felt the need for a bank to finance the growing opium trade with China, so they established (by special permit from the British) the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation – HSBC today – “The World’s Bank”.

This is the same bank that almost 30 years ago built the world’s most expensive building as their head office in Hong Kong – for 1 billion US dollars.

· The Sassoons Destroyed Everything They Touched

Money for these people was only a tool for making more money, no matter the disasters wrought upon the Chinese – or indeed any other nation.

Sir Albert Sassoon, the eldest of David Sassoon’s sons took over the family “business” empire. He constructed huge textile mills in Bombay that paid true slave wages. This early example of the “off-shoring of industries” continued after World War One and ended up putting mills in Lancashire, England out of business with thousands losing their jobs to the cheap labour of the Sassoons in India.

This did not stop Queen Victoria from having Albert knighted in 1872. After all, the Sassoons could prosper only after they had subverted the governance of China, whereupon Britain empowered the Sassoons to destroy and impoverish the people, for the glory of the British Empire.

Solomon Sassoon moved to Hong Kong and ran the family business there until his death in 1894. Later, the entire family moved to England because with modern communications they could operate their financial empire from their luxurious estates in London. They socialized with royalty and Edward Albert Sassoon married Alien Caroline de Rothschild in 1887 which linked their fortune with that of the Rothschild’s. The Queen then also had Edward knighted. All 14 of the grandsons of David Sassoon were made officers during World War One and thus most were able to avoid combat.

David Sassoon became a naturalised British citizen in 1853. He kept the dress and manners of the Baghdadi Jews, but allowed his sons to adopt English manners. His son, Abdullah changed his name to Albert, moved to England, became a Baronet and married into the Rothschild family. All the Sassoons of Europe are said to be descendants of David Sassoon.

· The Ubiquitous American Connection

Warren Delano was a senior partner in Russell & Company, whose ships carried the opium that was imposed on China. The reason Russell & Company were allowed to transport and trade in opium around Canton was that they were a Jewish company and did not interfere with the business of Sassoon’s East India Company.

The market was large enough for both. Russell & Company got their opium from Afghanistan through a harbor in Turkey.

Delano said later he could not pretend to justify the opium trade on moral grounds, “but as a merchant I insist it has been ……. fair, honorable and legitimate – no more objectionable than the importation of wines and spirits to the US.” He returned to America a rich man, and gave his daughter Sara in marriage to a James Roosevelt, the father of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the American President. Roosevelt’s fortune was inherited from his maternal grand-father Warren Delano. Roosevelt always knew the origin of the family fortune but neither side of the family cared to discuss the source of their great wealth.

· The Aftermath

The British-protected Sassoon opium trade brought death and destruction to millions and still plagues Asia to this day.

The forcible introduction of opium into China was not some minor event. It extended for much more than 100 years and totally devastated an entire nation of a billion people, weakening it to the point where it was a walkover for Japan to invade. In addition to the social and financial destruction, and the reversal of China’s development, these events led eventually to the civil war and Mao’s ascendance, and so much else since.

Nothing else in China’s history has had such an impact on what and where China is today. This brutal period of unconscionable imperialism and evil profiteering is surely one of the greatest two or three events in China’s 5,000 years of history.

Countless tens of millions of families were destroyed; fortunes lost, daughters prostituted, production collapsed, the economy crashed. The treasures and heritage of 5,000 years of a peaceful society ravaged by madness and destruction of the British and French. The toll was unimaginable. The British Crown and the Jewish Sassoons conspired to turn an entire nation of people into drug addicts of the worst kind, solely to satisfy their greed and lust for power.

This drug trade totally eviscerated China’s social fabric, virtually destroying not only the country but families and all of society. And, by most estimates, the forcible imposition of opium on The Middle Kingdom by Britain, and the clever and brutal marketing by the Sassoon Jews, set back China’s development at least 75 years.

And, using their magical technique of putting all of the blame of their sins upon a scapegoat, to this day the Jews claim that the Opium Trade of China was the fault of the British simply because the Sassoons all had British passports. And to this day, many Chinese believe them. And the British East India Company itself was owned, at least in large part, by these same families – the Rothschilds, the Sassoons, and others.

Any resentment that the Chinese might feel toward the British today, at least due to the imposition of opium, is partially misdirected. A fair share should be directed to these Jewish merchants.
Nowhere in British or Jewish history are the truths of this wantonly immoral family and the evil-inspired colonization told.

Instead, the Jewish books and encyclopedias all praise the Sassoons for their “great contribution” to Indian society, without a mention of the God-forsaken criminality of these people.
And of course, the sentimental British still revel in fond memories of their once-great Empire – when they ruled the world and the Seven Seas – while concurrently suffering a pathological amnesia for the unconscionable evils they committed.

It was due to this, to the weakened and almost helpless state of the country, that other foreigners – and then the Japanese – could move in and attempt to colonise this entire great country.
But there’s more. Imperial wars require heavy financing. It is true that Japan raided the treasuries of every country they invaded, to obtain funds for further expansion. War financing can be difficult to trace, but it is almost a certainty that much of their financing came from the Jewish bankers who have always financed wars – the Rothschilds, Joseph Schiff and, in this case, the Sassoons – who used their profits from destroying and weakening China to finance the Japanese invasion and further colonisation of China. It is popular lore that China welcomed and gave harbor to many Jews during their troubled times in Germany during the Second World War, but I have seen no hard evidence that this was the case. It would appear that “China” did not invite, receive or harbor Jews during those periods, that this is yet another common (and deliberate) misconception.

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Evidence suggests that the influx of Jews into China was arranged by the Sassoons, the Hardoons, probably Schiff, and other Jewish families, in agreements made with the Japanese military occupation which they were helping to finance. Virtually all of those Jewish immigrants came primarily to Shanghai, which was at the time well outside the control of China’s government which had nothing whatever to say about the influx of immigrants there, Jews or otherwise.<>

Bibliography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sassoon
http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/jan/article129.html
http://app1.chinadaily.com.cn/star/2001/0510/cu18-2.html
http://www.earnshaw.com/shanghai-ed-india/tales/t-sass.htm
http://www.cjss.org.cn/wangwen.htm

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Fine antique 19th century – Chinese porcelain & details.

The Wanton Destruction of China’s ‘Yuan Ming Yuan’.

– Jewish Opium and British Imperialism – [Part 2]

China’s Yuan Ming Yuan was almost certainly the greatest – and most valuable – palace/museum complex that had existed in the history of the world. This incredible creation of palaces, gardens and museums comprised almost 4 square kilometres and contained more than 10 million priceless and irreplaceable treasures representing more than 5,000 years of the history of the world’s most ancient civilisation. – It took 150 years to build, and only three weeks to utterly destroy. . . . . The purpose of this article is to tell that story.

It involves the Jewish Sassoon family, their exclusive Chinese opium franchise, the British and French governments, imperialism, greed, and the wanton, savage and pathological destruction of a world heritage, on a scale never before seen.

To fully appreciate this story you should read the background article entitled:

“The Jewish Monopoly on Opium Still Fuels Chinese Resentment Today.” (On pages 1-8 above)

· The Yuan Ming Yuan – 圆明

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An old painting depicting a portion of the palaces & gardens of the great ‘Yuan Ming Yuan’ of China.

The ‘Garden of Perfect Brightness’ – the great Yuan Ming Yuan of China – was one of the most magnificent gardens in the history of the world.

Spanning more than 350 hectares (about 4 square kilometres), it was a fairyland of hills, ponds, lakes, ancient trees and palaces.

YuanMingYuan was considered as one of the finest examples of Chinese garden landscape ever created.
Artisans were recruited from all over China to enact the exquisite Chinese garden settings, the mountain scenes and the a hundred odd palaces, pavilions and halls with bridges, pagodas and temples.
A third of the ground was given to nature in the form of streams, ponds, rockeries, hillocks, cliffs, ravines and cave. The YuanMingYuan was renowned throughout the world for its fabled charms and association with Chinese modern history. Extolled as the “Garden of Gardens” and the “Versailles of the East” during its heyday, it was an imperial summer resort painstakingly built and repeatedly expanded under the personal supervision of five emperors of the Qing Dynasty.

· The Yuan Ming Yuan Museum – 圆明园博物馆
But Yuan Ming Yuan was much more than just a garden or a selection of palaces; it was a museum, without question the largest and most valuable museum the world had ever seen. It contained more than 10 million artifacts, relics, and irreplaceable and priceless treasures representing 5,000 years of the world’s oldest culture and civilisation.

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An artist’s sketch of a portion of the ‘Yuan Mning Yuan’ as it then existed.

Built during a period of almost 150 years, various Chinese emperors collected from across the country the finest samples of all that was precious and valuable – and irreplaceable – representing all facets of the country’s vast and deep 5,000 years of history and culture. Furniture made of red sandalwood, redwood and other rare materials decorated the numerous halls in which these countless rare cultural relics were on display.

Bronze and gold castings were everywhere. Countless gold castings were destroyed by the British because they didn’t believe so many objects could be made of real gold.

The French writer Victor Hugo once remarked, “With all its treasures, Notre Dame in Paris is no match for Yuanmingyuan, that enormous and magnificent museum in the East.” It contained the world’s largest collection of artistic treasures and cultural relics, and an almost unimaginable imperial library of priceless books, calligraphy and writings.

As one of the four most famous imperial libraries, the Wenyuan Hall (Hall of Literary Profundity) in the garden originally housed such precious ancient books as The Complete Library of Four Branches of Books (《四库全书》), Gems of the Complete Library of Four Branches of Books (《四库全书荟要》), and The Completed Collection of Graphs and Writings of Ancient and Modern Times (《古今图书集成》).

· The Yuan Ming Yuan Administrative Residence – 圆明园行政公寓
For almost 150 years, Yuan Ming Yuan served for China’s government administration, vacation and residences for six generations of emperors in the Qing dynasty. The emperor and his wives would live in Yuan Ming Yuan after Chinese New Year until the end of autumn. It was the summer retreat and sometimes main residence of Qing emperors.

· Opium, Misery, Profit and War – 鸦片苦难利润和战

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Another artist’s sketch of the front entrance to the ‘Yuan Mning Yuan’

The Sassoon’s opium franchise was totally supported by the full might of the world’s greatest militarythat of the British Empire.

As a result, China’s very social fabric was being slowly eviscerated, the economy being destroyed, the country’s financial reserves disappearing, the nation becoming weaker.

Naturally, the Chinese began fighting back, but the British government and the Jewish families who controlled the fantastically profitable opium trade were not to be easily discouraged.

During one period of resistance in 1856, the Chinese seized some ships, threw the opium cargo into the rivers, arrested and killed some of the crew. The Sassoons demanded retaliation and compensation for their loss.

To accommodate them, Britain falsely claimed the ships and cargo to be British and commenced military reprisals against China. However, it is generally believed that the British used these events as a pretext for already-planned military action intended to make China more pliable to commercial penetration and more amenable to an intended colonial partition of the country.

· Flames of the Yuan Ming Yuan –烧圆明

In August 1860, English and French forces under the command of Generals Hope Grant and Cousin-Montauban, invaded the undefended Yuan Ming Yuan and began looting the palaces and museums. There followed an orgy of indiscriminate plunder and destruction, continuing until both French and British felt they could carry no more. Anything that could not be carted off was ordered destroyed. Lord Elgin, the British commander-in-chief, ordered that, as a final blow and act of ultimate revenge, the now-looted Yuan Ming Yuan should be set on fire and destroyed. This was the son of the Lord Elgin who looted the marble friezes from Greece’s Parthenon.

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Photo taken by Ernst Ohlmer in 1873. Believed to be the earliest photos of the Yuamningyuan.

“The British calculated that the destruction would break the Chinese emperor’s will to resist, and they seem to have been right. China surrendered the same day and signed the disadvantageous Convention of Peking, which among other things opened more Chinese ports for international commerce and legalized the opium trade.” The French claim to have objected to this destruction, but firm evidence supporting this position appears to be lacking.

In any case, the French participated quite fully in the ensuing cultural atrocities, being quite willing not only to take their share of the “prizes” but to destroy what they couldn’t steal.

Everything that remained, all treasures, artifacts, books, cultural relics, that could not be looted were deliberately destroyed. Everything was smashed, broken and ruined. Then all the buildings were set aflame, with fires that burned for days, with such a volume of smoke that on occasion it appeared all of Beijing was in flames.

Because the YuanMingYuan was so vast – roughly five times the size of Beijing’s Forbidden City and eight times that of the Vatican City – it took an entire infantry division of nearly 4,500 men, including four British regiments and the 15th Punjabis, to set it aflame.

N.B. The stories we hear today of Bill Gates or Warren Buffett being “the richest man in the world” are just urban legends for the naive. The Rothschilds, the Sassoons and similar families today, are each worth an estimated 6 to 7 trillion dollars.

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A photo of some of the ruins of the Yuan Ming Yuan today. Only some carved stone rubble survives.

In total, it took more than 7,500 soldiers more than three weeks to wantonly and unforgivably destroy and burn to the ground the greatest concentration of cultural treasures that had ever existed in the history of the world.

“Gilded beams crashed, porcelain roofs buckled, ash filled the lakes and embers snowed down on Beijing, where clouds of dense smoke eclipsed the sun.

Upon hearing the news, the ailing 30-year-old Xianfeng emperor vomited blood; less than a year later he was dead.”

“It was a sacrifice of all that was most ancient and most beautiful.” Acknowledged Robert McGhee, chaplain to the British forces and a participant in, and defender of, the destruction. “It is gone, but I do not know how to tear myself from it.” – “I love to linger over the recollection, but I cannot make you see it,” – he wrote. “A man must be a poet, a painter, a historian, a virtuoso, a Chinese scholar, and I don’t know how many other things besides, to give you even an idea of it, and I am not an approach to any one of them. But whenever I think of beauty and taste, of skill and antiquity, while I live, I shall see before my mind’s eye some scene from those grounds, those palaces.”

· But it was Profitable – 但它是盈利的

It is finally even more painful and outrageous to realise that this accumulation of 5,000 years of culture was deliberately plundered and razed to the ground as a kind of “punishment”, to mellow a colonial victim into submission.

And it was done by the English and French forces primarily to protect the “business” interests of the Jewish Sassoon family in their unconscionable crusade to destroy an entire ancient civilisation of people with an addictive drug – for the sake of their personal wealth.

For the Sassoons, it was worth the effort. They became the richest family in the world at the time, second only to the Rothschilds themselves. By the 1860s, the Sassoons were multi-billionaires.

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Another photo of the Yuamningyuan ruins as they are today.

· China will never forget – 中国永远不会忘记

A century and a half later, the YuanMingYuan holds a similar grip on the China that has inherited its ruins and can forget neither its vanished glory nor its vindictive desecration. Ultimately, a loss as great as that of the YuanMingYuan may be one with which China will never come to terms.

“The YuanMingYuan is the shame in the heart of the Chinese people,” said Que Weimin, a professor at the World Heritage Research Center at Peking University.

“And it’s a reminder for the whole world that such destruction of human cultural heritage should not happen again.”

Anyone who appreciates beauty and human enterprise will be outraged when they visit the present YuanMingYuan.
In a Chinese museum today is a copy of a letter written in 1861 by Victor Hugo condemning the destruction by the invading Anglo-French troops as barbaric.

It is painful to see the ruins and think that this once beautiful imperial park with its exquisite gardens, Chinese palaces and Western Baroque buildings, contained millions of art treasures and cultural relics and an imperial library of irreplaceable books.

Under the order of Premier Zhou Enlai, the Yuan Ming Yuan became a park to remind the Chinese and the world of the destruction wrought by European colonial powers to a harmless and priceless cultural entity that rightly belongs to mankind.

It was a tragedy that the Yuan Ming Yuan took so many years to raise to glory but only a few days of wanton destruction in 1860 to obliterate. Such was a painful waste for humanity, this fruit of man’s ingenuity, conceived as a Garden of all Chinese Gardens.

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The Yuamningyuan Lake drained of its water and the grounds bereft of life and beauty.

But, this wasn’t the end. Again, in 1900, the allied forces of the Eight Powers invaded Beijing and sacked the remaining buildings in the park. Many priceless artifacts that were plundered made their ways to the museums & private collections in Europe – where they still remain. . . England & France have yet to apologies for this atrocity, or admit that it occurred!

There are 3 articles in this series:

· Part 1: Jewish Opium and British Imperialism: Editorial by 龙信明 (see pages 2- 9)
· Part 2: The Wanton Destruction of the Yuanmingyuan in Beijing: (see pages 10 – 16)
One more part to this story – the location & possession today of approximately 10 million treasured artifacts as:

· Part 3: Where are the Treasures Today? 珍品今日在哪里?To be posted shortly.Editorial by 龙信

clip_image034· Bibliography
By SHEILA MELVIN in the New York Times; October 21, 2010

http://en.beijing2008.cn/spectators/beijing/tourism/list/n214068425.shtml
Kutcher, Norman. 2003. “China’s place of memory,” Wilson Quarterly 27(1), 30-40.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/chr/drupal/ref/1860-sack-of-yuanming-yuan
Wolseley, Garnet. 1862. Narrative of the War with China in 1860. London: Longman, Green, Longman & Robert.
http://www.chinapage.com/friend/goh/beijing/yuanmingyuan/yuanmingyuan.html

· URL-Active Links

Old Summer PalaceYuanMingYuan – Wikipedia.

YuanMingYuan – Park (303 photos; 2 videos) &Yuan Ming YuanImages

Yuan Ming Yuan Photo Gallery by Victor Lim at pbase.com

A Post Script to our contemporary ‘Parsi Dons’

My request to our young dons for ‘due-diligence’ before writing scholarly articles/reviews on this subject; and to suppress the urge to rub the collective Parsi proboscis in the Mumbai mud, with these ‘fables’ of ill-gotten ‘fame & fortune’ through the opium trade, in cahoots with the Brits. … by Parsi Sethia’s of yore. E. Kanga.

Parsis who are squeamish about their ‘fabled history’ as ‘Opium Traders’ during the later part of the 19th century, need not fret too much. Above articles make no mention of Cama & Sons or Jivanji brothers or Jamshedji Jeejeebhoy etal. A few Parsis, no doubt were involved as minor players in this game of ‘Exchange Tea for Opium’; played by the British. The really big participants in this trade/tragedy were the Sassoons of Bombay – India. . . . . Those interested in the rise of the next Super Power, its ancient heritage and history; should read the following three books. ‘The Man who Loved China’ by Simon Winchester.[ISBN 978-0-06-088459-8] ‘1421’ & ‘1438’ by Gavin Menzies.

Edul Kanga, Greater Toronto Area