good behavior and payment of taxes. Myers and Wang have concluded that, regardless of these restrictions, that trade between China and Europe grew at an average annual rate of 4% between 1719 and 1806, doubling the volume of trade every 18 years. This helped China's interior markets and its coastal city ports, providing additional demand for domestic products. Guangzhou in particular saw the growth of specialty export porcelain and export artwork designed to cater to the interests of the European factors. Some members of Guangzhou's Cohong were counted among the richest men in the world; Howqua personally contributed a third of China's entire reparations due after the First Opium War. The policy also normalized Guangzhou's tax base and inflow of foreign silver, which persisted as one of the biggest imports from the outside. Due to its incessant need in the economy, silver had become a resource of national importance. By restricting imports mostly to bullion, however, it created strong pressure on the British – for whom tea had become the national drink over the course of the 18th century – to find any means possible to adjust the balance of trade. After several embassies failed to persuade the Chinese to expand legal trade, a refusal traditionally credited to Macartney and others' refusal to kowtow or observe other niceties of Chinese protocol, the solution turned out to be smuggled Indian opium. It is estimated that between 1821 and 1840, as much as one-fifth of the silver circulating in China was used to purchase opium. According to Li Xiantang, silver imports made China richer, but it did not open up opportunities of the sort the that the industrial revolution was opening in Britain and western Europe. Instead, China slipped into the "pitfall of high equilibrium" due to excessive consumption of resources. Xiantang argues: The growth of population and income and the polarization of the economy and society resulted in increasing pressure on resources. This restricted the demand from the bottom of society, enabling Asia to acquire cheap labor more easily than other areas, but it also led to the decline of production and trade....It was this short-lived prosperity that strangled the Chinese nation. Above all, the import of silver helped nurture the prosperity of the primitive handicraft industry, that is, so-called budding capitalism, and this was the last revival of the self-sufficient small peasant economic system. It retarded its own decline through