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
Global silver trade from the 16th to 18th centuries became a player in the global economy via frequent Ming merchant ships arriving to extract Japan's abundance of silver and exchange goods. Japan increased its wealth through successful trilateral trade with Portugal and China as Japan now had Chinese goods to offer the Portuguese who had silver mines of their own. Founder of the Ming China dynasty, Hongwu, actually sought to eliminate silver from the market due to his fear of inflation which he previously experienced in the Yuan dynasty. His attempt involved imposing harsh limits on silver mining to stop its flow into the market and subsequently replaced it