Hongli was born as the chosen one. His dad Yinzhen loved him. His grandpa Xuanye loved him. They loved him so much that they gave him the best they had: an empire at its peak.
Hongli was a prolific poet. His dad replied to 40,000 emails, he wrote 40,000 poems. Take, for example, “Snowflakes”:
One flake one flake one more flake,
Two flakes three flakes four five flakes,
Six flakes seven flakes eight nine flakes,
And he was stuck. How do you finish the last line? Keep counting? Then a minister came to the rescue with:
Flew into flowers, no more flakes.
His other hobby was to Ecce Homo-fy other people’s art. There’s a famous calligrapher’s letter, the letter itself has 28 characters. Hongli kept gluing paper onto it, making it a few meters long. Then he wrote a bunch of poems and put 170 stamps on that thing. Imagine what he’d do to the Mona Lisa. He’d write on the sky above her head: Look at the corners of her eyes and mouth. What technique did the artist use? It’s like she’s always looking at you and smiling. The uneven horizon in the background too, so mysterious! I have more thoughts, which this margin is too small to contain. Then on her forehead: MASTERPIECE. Followed by 50 appreciation seals.
While Hongli was having fun, the Europeans were figuring out how to use steam to operate machinery, and the Americans were figuring out how to write the Declaration of Independence.
Then Hongli got older. As he spent more time with absolute power, he became more holier-than-thou, more conservative. The British wanted to celebrate his birthday. They sent a team of merchants carrying advanced technology as gifts. When he saw the guns and cannons, he was like, meh. It didn’t occur to him that those weapons might one day be used on his own people. When he saw the Steam Machine, he was like, meh. Maybe he wasn’t a console guy. The merchants were sent back without making any deals.
As Hongli got older, he became increasingly lazy and delegated everything to a minister named Heshen. Heshen was smart. He always knew whatever Hongli was thinking. So Hongli stopped working, and Heshen went on to become the first multi-billionaire in China through corruption. When Heshen died, they found 40,000 metric tonnes of silver from his estate. And we haven’t counted his gold, land, and real property. Hongli also loved his son. He loved him so much that he gave him the best he had: Heshen. You break open this piggy bank, take all the money, and get labeled a good emperor for killing a corrupt minister.
The problem was that money couldn’t solve all problems. Heshen had started the corruption trend, and all the other ministers followed. It was tradition now. If you wanted to become an official, the only way was to bribe someone. Then after you became an official, you recouped the cost through other people bribing you.
The other problem was that the population had increased 10-fold in the past 100 years, but the farmland had not. There were no breakthroughs in agricultural technology. So food prices went up. A lot of people lost their homes. Peasants started to rebel. Hongli’s son tried to fix things by saving money. But money couldn’t solve all problems.
The British merchants had been sent back, but the British were still allowed to do business. They sold everything, including a painkiller called opium. Then there was a breakthrough in pharmaceutical technology. Some genius figured out that if you light up opium and smoke it, it’s way more effective. More and more people wanted to buy it. The British were confused. But hey, business is business. In the end, opium was the only thing they sold.
The throne passed to Hongli’s grandson, Minning. Minning thought his father hadn’t been saving enough, so he tried to save even more money. On his wife’s birthday, they celebrated with noodles and soy sauce. One time, he asked a minister what he’d had for breakfast. The minister said eggs. Minning was shocked, an egg costs five taels of silver, how can you afford that? The minister quickly said, actually I only ate the shells. At that time, the price of an egg was only a few coins.
Minning understood that opium was costing his empire tons of money, so he ordered a minister to dump the opium into the sea. After the British learned about it, they sailed their warships to China and said, I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed. And they were about to make a deal that the Qing couldn’t refuse.