Hello and welcome to the We Are History podcast with me, Angela Barnes.

And me, John O'Farrell.

And this week we've decided we are going to talk about the first, that's the number one, opium war.

Now the opium wars wasn't something that I knew much about.

It's the sort of phrase that you hear, the opium wars.

Basically, it was, you know, the first war on drugs, and Britain was on the side of drugs.

Very much, so, very much so.

So I want to start this podcast.

This is a war between Britain and China.

I want to start by apologising right now for any pronunciations.

Oh, yeah.

That I might make.

I don't usually start a podcast with an apology,

but I know my Chinese pronunciations are not great.

So I just want to get that out there.

I'll probably use quite a lot of anglicised versions of things.

How's your Chinese pronunciations on you?

I'm not going to try doing a Chinese accent.

No, we're definitely not going to do that.

Don't pay.

If anyone's sitting there with their butt-wet clenched, waiting to see how we deal with this,

please relax.

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