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
History of the Jews in China Revolution arrived in China. By the time of the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, only a few Chinese Jews were known to have maintained the practice of their religion and culture though the Kaifeng synagogue survived for around seven centuries until 1860. China's Jewish communities have been ethnically diverse ranging from the Jews of Kaifeng and other places during the history of Imperial China, who, it is reported, came to be more or less totally assimilated into the majority Han Chinese populace due to widespread intermarriage. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, however, some