Stephen R. Platt > Quotes

“So in the end, perhaps the tale of the foreign intervention and the fall of the Taiping (Rebellion) is a tale of trust misplaced. It is a tale of how sometimes the connections we perceive across cultures and distances—our hopes for an underlying unity of human virtue, our belief that underneath it all we are somehow the same—can turn out to be nothing more than the fictions of our own imagination. And when we congratulate ourselves on seeing through the darkened window that separates us from another civilization, heartened to discover the familiar forms that lie hidden among the shadows on the other side, sometimes we do so without ever realizing that we are only gazing at our own reflection.”
― Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War

“And when those who sold it came back home, they did not”
― Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age

“And if the climate in New England might be too cold for the comfort of an elderly Chinese businessman who had spent his life in subtropical Canton, Forbes suggested he could look into buying property in Florida, or in the Caribbean, “where the climate is beautiful, and where for a small sum you could buy as much land as is covered by Canton.” Houqua could live there however he pleased; he would have his own Canton, on his own terms. John said he would relish the chance to sail down from Massachusetts to visit him. Maybe he would come every winter. Houqua died on September 4, 1843, never having gotten the letter.”
― Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight

“But it was not the effect on China of the palace’s destruction that he regretted; rather, what he regretted was that he had destroyed a beautiful thing.”
― Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War

“I am disposed to believe,” he concluded, “that under this mass of abortions and rubbish there lie hidden some sparks of a diviner fire, which the genius of my countrymen may gather and nurse into a flame.”
― Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War

“doyen”
― Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age

“This,” he declared, “is what civilization has done to barbarism.”
― Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War

“pusillanimous”
― Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age

“speak of it.”
― Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age

“conviction that China was a country that somehow demanded British intervention.”
― Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War

“The same might be said of his critics as well, even Victor Hugo; it was not for China that they cried shame, but for art.”
― Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War

“The basic fact was that the opium poppy grew very well in British India, which otherwise was a spectacularly unprofitable colonial venture (and which, without the rich profits from the Canton tea trade to offset its losses and debts, would likely have bankrupted the East India Company).”
― Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight

“sedition”
― Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age

“Nevertheless, such powerful and widely read depictions of opium’s power to consume a man and ruin his life did not impinge in any direct way on the brute fact of the foreign traffic at Canton, by which certain countrymen of the horrified readers of De Quincey’s accounts—respectable ones, no less—were by the early 1830s pouring that very same drug into China in amounts totaling more than two and a half million pounds by weight each year. But that was happening far away, halfway around the world.”
― Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age

“Mercifully, he also reminded him not to let the carefree joys of youth slip by. “Enjoy them all while you may,” wrote Thomas in 1828, “for the time will come soon when they shall have passed away.”
― Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age