Hey, everyone out there, all CHP stalwarts, new listeners, and everyone else who stumbled

into me.

Los Lomont-Gummery here, coming to you once again, talking about Guangzhou, we're going

to try and finish things off in this part six of a series where we traced the long timeline

of Chinese history and viewed it through the prism of this great and historic city.

From Chinshure Huang's time, 22 and a half centuries before, up until basically when the

European merchant seamen started showing up in the South China seas in greater frequency,

the history of Guangzhou was one that had always been dominated by trade and commerce, always

living up to its moniker of China's front door where overseas trade was concerned, but

not with Korean Japan, of course, but everyone else.

The events of the opium wars transformed Guangzhou beyond its traditional role as a trade

entrepoh.

Following these events that shook the dynasty in the nation like nothing else had ever

done before, Guangzhou emerged as a bastion of resistance to the dynasty itself, foreign

intervention and Qing dynasty affairs, and later on against the warlords.

Chinese officials, military figures, and intellectuals in China realized only too late that their

leaders in Beijing had made the most out of missing out on every possible opportunity.

And because of all the inward-looking policies and manchew suspicion of their Han Chinese

subjects, at the exact moment what the West was having a great leap forward, China was

caught flat-footed and paid for this in terrible ways.

Last time we went over the humiliating treaties that institutionalized all those laws and regulations

demanded by the foreign powers in China.

...