Outside In | Donald Trump should learn a lesson from imperial China’s failed rhubarb war with Britain
- Rhubarb played an overlooked role in the opium war, after Qing China made a ludicrous miscalculation of foreigners’ reliance on the plant. In the current trade war, is Trump similarly in danger of misjudging China’s economic situation?
Revisiting the English county of Yorkshire this month for the first time in decades has brought back sharp, poignant memories – and none so peculiar as those of the frost pocket known as the Rhubarb Triangle between Leeds, Wakefield and Bradford.
Rhubarb seems to have originated in the northern parts of Russia and China, and it was being used as far as 2700BC. For the Chinese, rhubarb – called da huang or “big yellow” in Mandarin – was a potent purgative, used only to treat grave illness. Only the roots and fluorescent red stalks were consumed; the huge green leaves contain large quantities of oxalic acid, making them highly toxic. In the Ming dynasty, the Chinese pharmacopoeia Bencao Gangmu, or Compendium of Materia Medica, listed 48 uses for the plant; Zhang Jiebing, a physician at the time, extolled rhubarb as one of the four cardinal drugs.
Export demand for rhubarb became massive during the 1700s – a Russian royal monopoly on Chinese rhubarb was in force until 1781 – and silk, porcelain, tea and rhubarb were Qing China’s main exports.
But it seems the Chinese emperor and his court had little knowledge of, or interest in, why Westerners consumed so much rhubarb. During a long border war with Russia in the 1780s, Chinese threats to cut off rhubarb exports seemed to bring the Russians quickly to the negotiating table, and the imperial court in Beijing concluded that there was something special about rhubarb that made foreign barbarians peculiarly reliant on it.