te eighteenth century on, opium began to be imported,
the silver left China again. The merchants profited this time from the
opium trade, but farmers had to suffer: the price of silver went up, and
taxes had to be paid in silver, while farm products were sold for
copper. By 1835, the ounce of silver had a value of 2,000 copper coins
instead of one thousand before 1800. High gains in commerce prevented
investment in industries, because they would give lower and later
profits than commerce. From the nineteenth century on, more and more
industrial goods were offered by importers which also prevented
industrialization. Finally, the gentry basically remained
anti-industrial and anti-business. They tried to operate necessary
enterprises such as mining, melting, porcelain production as far as
possible as government establishments; but as the operators were
officials, they were not too business-minded and these enterprises did
not develop well. The businessmen certainly had enough capital, but they
invested it in land instead of investing it in industries which could at
any moment be taken away by the government, controlled by the officials
or forced to sell at set prices, and which were always subject to
exploitation by dishonest officials. A businessman felt secure only when
he had invested in land, when he had received an official title upon the
payment of large sums of money, or when he succeeded to push at least
one of his sons into the government bureaucracy. No doubt, in spite of
all this, Chinese business and industry kept on developing in the Manchu
time, but they did not develop at such a speed as to transform the
country from an agrarian into a modern industrial nation.

3 _Expansion in Central Asia; the first State treaty_

The rise of the Manchu dynasty actually began under the K'ang-hsi rule
(1663-1722). The emperor had three tasks. The first was the removal of
the last supporters of the Ming dynasty and of the generals, such as Wu
San-kui, who had tried to make themselves independent. This necessitated
a long series of campaigns, most of them in the south-west or south of
China; these scarcely affected the population of China proper. In 1683
Formosa was occupied and the last of the insurgent army commanders was
defeated. It was shown above that the situation of all these leaders
became hopeless as soon as the Manchus had occupied the rich Yangtze
region and the intelligentsia and the gentry of that region had g