The first Westerner to visit China and write about it was Marco Polo in the late 13th century. He wrote of Hangzhou, "The city is beyond dispute the finest and the noblest in the world." and rated Quanzhou as one of the two busiest ports on earth. (The other was Alexandria.) Among the Chinese innovations that Europeans first heard of from Polo were paper money, window glass and coal.

  By the 19th century, various Western powers had taken various pieces of China and trade was well established.

    The relationship, however, was fraught with difficulties. Westerners tended to see China as corrupt and massage guangzhou decadent. Chinese often viewed the West as greedy and contemptible. Both were right, at least part of the time.

The great issue, however, was opium. For the West, the profitable commodities were "pigs and poison," indentured laborers and opium.

   Britain's balance of trade ¡ª paying for tea and silk in silver and being quite unable to interest Chinese in most British products ¡ª would have been disastrous without opium. However, by growing opium in India and exporting vast amounts to China, they were able to have a nice trade surplus. Many Chinese were involved as well, and some made fortunes from it, but every Chinese government from the Qing to the present day has been unalterably opposed to the trade.

Several wars were fought in China in that century.

  Two Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) pitted China against Western powers. China quickly lost both wars. After the first one, Britain got Hong Kong island, and five "treaty ports" (Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Shanghai and Ningbo) were opened to Western trade. After the second,guangzhou massage  Britain got Kowloon, and inland cities such as Nanjing and Wuhan were opened to trade.
  There were several Muslim rebellions in Western China.

   The suppression of these rebellions brought what is now Xinjiang firmly under central rule.
   The Qing government, with some Western help, eventually defeated them, but not before the Taiping had ruled much of China for over ten years.

  this was one of the bloodiest wars ever fought; only World War II killed more people. Nanjing, which was their capital, has an interesting Taiping museum.
In 1895, China lost the Sino-Japanese massage guangzhou  war and ceded Taiwan to Japan. In addition, it had to relinquish control of Korea, which had been a tributary state of China for a long time.
  Around 1898, these feelings exploded. The Boxers were another more-or-less crazy largely peasant religious/political movement; their main goal was to drive out evil foreign influences, and some believed their kung fu and prayer would stop bullets. They had some support from the Qing court and regional officials. They killed some missionaries and many Chinese Christians and eventually besieged the embassies in Beijing. A force was sent up from Tianjin and freed the legations. The Qing had to accept foreign troops permanently posted in Beijing as result.

  Many Chinese massage guangzhou  resented various things in this period ¡ª notably missionaries, opium, grabbing Chinese land and the extraterritoriality provisions in the "unequal treaties" that made many foreigners immune to Chinese law. To the West trade and missionaries were good things, and extraterritoriality was prudent in view of the corrupt and brutal laws in place.

   The Emperor imposed various restrictions on trade, allowing Westerns to trade only at Canton (Guangzhou), only with payment in silver, and only with a government-approved monopoly of traders called the Cohong. Export of items that would break Chinese monopolies, such as tea seeds or silk worms, was strictly forbidden. Traders eventually smuggled both out.

  Western traders resented these restrictions and struggled to interest the Chinese in Western goods, without notable success.

  The Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) was led by a madman claiming to be Christ's younger brother. It was largely a peasant revolt; its program included land reform and eliminating slavery, concubinage, arranged marriage, opium, massage in guangzhou , judicial torture and idolatry.