Opioid selling Indian opium which was smuggled into China in defiance of Chinese government bans. This led to the First (1839–1842) and Second Opium Wars (1856–1860) between China and Britain. In the 19th century, two major scientific advances were made that had far-reaching effects. Around 1804, German pharmacist Friedrich Sertürner isolated morphine from opium. He described its crystallization, structure, and pharmacological properties in a well-received paper in 1817. Morphine was the first alkaloid to be isolated from any medicinal plant, the beginning of modern scientific drug discovery. The second advance, nearly fifty years later, was the refinement of the hypodermic needle
An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China nations, the collapse of China, British domination of Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century, malevolent misunderstanding between the West and the Third World in the twentieth." Other historians such as Joanna Waley-Cohen and Benjamin A. Elman argue for a more complex dynamic between England and China well into the 19th century. Kenneth Pomeranz refers to Staunton´s account to highlight the economic similarities between China and the West and argues that the Chinese disadvantage of energy-generating resources and the European access to the New World caused the divergence between East and West rather than cultural miscommunication. An Authentic Account of an