bank secrets

[Lissa]

Hi,
Interesting. Not what I had remembered, so I checked Wiki. Astor is not mentioned in the article on the Opium War. The article on Astor only mentions the opium trade in a footnote (In 1816, John Jacob Astor of New York City joined the opium smuggling trade. His American Fur Company purchased ten tons of Turkish opium, then shipped the contraband item to Canton on the Packet Ship Macedonian. Astor would later leave the China opium trade and sell solely to England.) which makes it sound like he wasn't involved in it much.

I realize that my references are to Wiki, and all that means. However, years ago I read a couple of books on Chinese history which (of course) included the Opium Wars and don't remember Astor figuring in them at all. The history I remember is more like the outline at this PBS site.

So, it would seem that Astor was indeed involved in the opium trade, but his involvement seems small potatoes compared both to his other investments and the involvement of others. He was indeed very wealthy. Thus, I guess, he could qualify "as the wealthiest drug runner ever." though that seems a bit misleading.

Since my references are web based, they could be suspect. I'd like to hear anything you have backing up your version of the story. Might be a nice background feud behind it;)

--Pete

The History channel did a show on him and they mentioned that he was very highly involved in the Opium trade, such that they labelled him the wealthiest drug smuggler of all time. I can't remember the exact title of the show, but it was one of the series that they did on industrial magnets (they also covered Carnegie, Morgan Stanley, and someone else on that episode). The group that produced the episode dug really deep to get information on all of the people involved (and part of the reason I question Rockfeller beating Carnegie as the producers showed that Carnegie had a 10s of millions more than what was listed when he sold American Steel to Morgan Stanely and his group of investors, something along the lines that he was closer to 550 Million to 600 Million when he switched to Philantropy and somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 to 360 Billion adjusted by inflation). If there is one thing the History channel does right, they dig and dig and dig for information and I think Wikipedia may not have all the information that the Histoy Channel has dug up on some of these subjects.