n China. Although by 1800 only a few hundred thousand Chinese had been converted, the missionaries contributed greatly to Chinese knowledge (China History 2). The missionaries were especially skillful at fitting Christianity into a Chinese framework and were condemned by a papal decision in 1704 for having tolerated the continuance of Confucian ancestor rites among Christian converts. The papal decision quickly weakened the Christian movement.
             During the eightieth century, the market in Europe and America for tea, a new drink in the West, expanded greatly. Additionally, there was a continuing demand for Chinese silk and porcelain, but China, wanted little that the West had to offer, causing the Westerners, mostly British, to incur an unfavorable balance of trade (History 3). Soon the foreigners developed a third-party trade, exchanging their merchandise in India and Southeast Asia for raw materials and semiprocessed goods. By the early nineteenth century, raw cotton and opium from India had become the main British imports into China, in spite of the fact that opium was prohibited. The opium traffic was made possible through the convenience of profit seeking merchants.
             In 1839 the Qing government, after a decade of unsuccessful anti-opium campaigns, adopted drastic prohibitory laws against the opium trade (Guan 2). The emperor sent a commissioner, Lin Zexu, to Guangzhou to supress illicit opium traffic. Lin seized illegal stocks of opium owned by Chinese dealers and then detained the entire foreign community and confasicated and destroyed some 20,000 chests of illicit British opium (Guan 3). The British retaliated with an expedition, initiating the first Anglo-Chinese war, better known as the "Opium
             War" (1839-42) Unprepared for war and underestimating the capabilities of the enemy, the Chinese were defeated, and their image of their own imperial power was gone(Opium Wars 1). The Treaty of Nanjing (1842), sig...