The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China

by Julia Lovell

This “crisp and readable account” of the nineteenth century British campaign sheds light on modern Chinese identity through “a heartbreaking story of war” (The Wall Street Journal). In October 1839, a Windsor cabinet meeting voted to begin the first Opium War against China. Bureaucratic fumbling, military missteps, and a healthy dose of political opportunism and collaboration followed. Rich in tragicomedy, The Opium War explores the disastrous British foreign-relations move that became a founding myth of modern Chinese nationalism, and depicts China’s heroic struggle against Western conspiracy. Julia Lovell examines the causes and consequences of the Opium War, interweaving tales of the opium pushers and dissidents. More importantly, she analyses how the Opium Wars shaped China’s self-image and created an enduring model for its interactions with the West, plagued by delusion and prejudice.

Genres: History, China, Nonfiction, Asia, Politics, War, Drugs

481 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2011

About the author

Julia Lovell is a British scholar, author, and translator whose non-fiction books focus on China.

She is professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, where her research has been focused principally on the relationship between culture (specifically, literature, architecture, historiography and sport) and modern Chinese nation-building.

Lovell's books include The Politics of Cultural Capital: China's Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature (University of Hawaii Press, 2006); The Great Wall: China Against the World 1000 BC – AD 2000 (Atlantic Books, 2006); and The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Picador, 2011).

She is also a literary translator; her translations include works by Lu Xun, Han Shaogong, Eileen Chang and Zhu Wen. Zhu Wen's book I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China, which Lovell translated, was a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize in 2008. Her book The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China won the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature. It was the first non-fiction book to win the prize.

Lovell was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2010 in the category of Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern History. These prizes are given to young scholars who have made a significant contribution to their field.

She has written articles about China for The Guardian, The Times, The Economist and The Times Literary Supplement.

She is married to author Robert Macfarlane.

Reviews

[Maitreya · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author dismisses Chinese sufferings in the Opium war as a child's tantrum. She calls it a "tragicomedy" and a "useful event" in Chinese history - an event that is apparently used by the CCP to justify its rule. The following is an excerpt from my detailed book review originally published here.


Britain is a sunny place, but acceptance of its imperialist crimes is rather chilled. For example, to this day, Britain refuses to return many of the treasures that it stole from its colonies (and China), such as the Kohinoor diamond, which adorns the British Crown jewels. British government officials today fondly think about the good old days of imperialism. Somewhere deep inside the British consciousness, there still lurks a forced feeling of trying to justify or deflect criticism from its imperialist crimes. One of the best techniques ever devised to do so is to imply that the colonies that the British terrorized and destroyed were somehow deserving of their fate, that they brought it upon themselves - the 'blame the victim' strategy.

In order to make British imperialism appear less criminal and barbarous than it really was - this trick has proven to be remarkably effective, and has served to a very large extent to shift attention and criticism away from British bigotry.

Hence, Julia Lovell, the author of this book, quotes the typical anecdotal Indian novelist as saying that Indians have "generally been aware that (they've) been responsible for (their) own problems" , thus trying to create the impression that this is the general prevalent opinion among Indians, when in reality it is no such thing. However, since India is decidedly pro-western (in terms of both its history textbooks and its foreign policy) and presents no real threat, such arguments against India are less common.

China, on the other hand, is a country that, regardless of whether it is a threat or not, has been decided to be perceived as one by the western establishment and media. The phrase "(Chinese) self-loathing" can be found throughout the book. In the typical Thomas Friedman style of judging an entire country's opinion on the first person one meets outside the airport, she quotes Beijing taxi drivers as saying that China deserved it or "had it coming".

The basic premise of this western strategy has been to say that while the west humiliated China for a hundred years, China was already rotting from within. So what if Britain forced an illegal drug down its throat? The Economist simply calls it "free trade".

The Tragicomedy in the Opium War

Behold the book description from the back cover:

(The Opium War's) brutality notwithstanding, the conflict was also threaded with tragicomedy: with Victorian hypocrisy, bureaucratic fumblings, military missteps, political opportunism and collaboration. Yet over the past 170 years, this strange tale of misunderstanding, incompetence and compromise has become the founding myth of modern Chinese nationalism: the start of China's heroic struggle against a Western conspiracy to destroy the country with opium and gunboat diplomacy.

Yes - believe it or not, Lovell finds something funny in the tragedy. She actually calls the war "threaded with tragicomedy", something that was aptly described by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing as a mixture of emotions in which "seriousness stimulates laughter, and pain pleasure". In other words, Schadenfreude in its purest form. Of course it may be argued that a tragicomedy is simply a literary device, or even a pathway to finally accepting that "laughter is the only response left to man when he is faced with the tragic emptiness and meaninglessness of existence". Very true, humor is indeed something that is the ultimate form of cynicism and anger towards the injustices of this world. But why stop there? Why not call every war a "tragicomedy"? After all, doesn't every war have its share of "bureaucratic fumblings" and "military missteps"?

The usage of the term reflects the callous attitude towards the war, and British imperial crimes in general, by westerners (who never had to really face them) and by the British themselves. This indifferent attitude pervades the entire book.

It would be unthinkable for a British or western historian to use the epithet to describe, say, World War II or the Holocaust - events that elicit feelings of tragedy and loss in the west. It doesn't take too much imagination to imagine the reaction if someone published a book calling the Holocaust a "tragicomedy". In fact, just as a mental exercise in parallelism, the entire blurb above can be modified to produce an exact parallel describing the Holocaust, another tragic incident that Israel derives its (and its nuclear weapons') legitimacy and justification from:

(The Holocaust's) brutality notwithstanding, the conflict was also threaded with tragicomedy: with Nazi hypocrisy, bureaucratic fumblings, military missteps, political opportunism and collaboration. Yet over the past 7o years, this strange tale of misunderstanding, incompetence and compromise has become the founding myth of modern Israeli nationalism: the start of Israel's heroic struggle against an anti-Semitic conspiracy to destroy the Jews.

Defending the indefensible

Officially of course, British crimes cannot be denied or justified. Hence, any discussion about such issues appears with a disclaimer or clarification quietly tucked away in a corner. As Humphrey Appleby once famously remarked - A clarification is not to make oneself clear, it is to put oneself in the clear. For example, The Economist's review of Lovell's book - a welter of words that remains one of the most imperialistic, chauvinistic, and sadistic pieces ever written about the Opium war in modern times - contains a sentence, added almost as an afterthought as if doing a favor to China in acknowledging British crimes: "Westerners have good reason to be ashamed of their treatment of China in the 19th century". This is quickly followed by a counter-statement lest the reader read too much into it: "Yet Ms Lovell contends that they administered only the final blows to an empire that was already on the brink."

This concept should come as no surprise to regular readers of The Economist, a newspaper that quite enjoys reporting Chinese deaths in incidents that prove the government's incompetence and "wasteful spending", such as its satirical reaction ("Whoops") to the deaths of 40 Chinese in the Wenzhou Train crash. This disclaimer is issued in letter and in spirit by Lovell herself in her book as well as on promotional platforms: "The British national character is portrayed very negatively in Chinese textbooks, which is right and proper. The British are ashamed of our imperial past: the racism, massacres and involvement in the slave trade."

In her book she argues that the Opium war is the "founding episode of modern Chinese nationalism" (which is the standard term specifically reserved to describe Chinese people's love for their country i.e. patriotism). Lovell calls the Opium war a "useful episode" in Chinese history - and repeats the much ballyhooed assertion that it is used by the CCP to justify its rule. This "Opium war button" as she calls it, can apparently be pressed by the CCP at any time to "remind the Chinese people that the West has always been full of schemes to undermine China".

However, how exactly this curious phenomenon of a government justifying its rule by a 170-year-old war occurs is not very clear. Perhaps proponents of this theory assume that a farmer whose land has been forcibly taken away is going to forgive the government because Britain forced China to import Opium 170 years ago. This would make a good story for The Onion: CHINESE FARMER LOVES GOVERNMENT FOR DESTROYING HIS HOME BECAUSE BRITAIN HUMILIATED CHINA IN THE OPIUM WARS.

Two tragedies don't make a right

Most Britishers have never heard of the Opium war. Those that have are largely limited to historians and academics. Among them, the simple reality of the Opium wars - that they were a blatant act of aggression by a European power on a defenseless Asian empire - are sidelined, and the only major aspect of the legacy of the war and the following century is just reduced to blind criticism of the CCP and its "patriotic education". The usage of the century of humiliation by the CCP to "justify it's own rule" is used as a smokescreen to deflect a balanced discussion about British atrocities and two-facedness. Julia Lovell, in this well-researched work that has been universally praised in the media, tries desperately to present this much-needed balanced view, and as those numerous praises would have us believe, largely succeeds.

Lovell accuses the Chinese government of imbalance: "The problem with these Chinese textbooks is not one of accuracy, per se, but of balance", she says. "China’s education system spends far more time remembering the Opium Wars than the traumas of Communism, such as the man-made famine that killed tens of millions, and the crackdown of 1989. It offers a skewed sense of history." But she then goes on to say that China "has tampered with the historical record".

This is one of the many standard tactics among such historians, who precipitately jump to take refuge in false comparisons. To explain this phenomenon, I propose a Goodwin's law of Chinese historical analogies, which states that, "As a discussion about Chinese history grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Mao's policies or Tienanmen approaches one".

Any discussion about Chinese history must necessarily mention about how Chinese textbooks ignore the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and anything else one can think of. This tendency has now become ubiquitous, whether one is discussing the Nanjing massacre or the Opium wars, even when the two issues being compared have no relation with one another. The Opium wars have nothing to do with the "traumas of communism", but they are still mentioned in one breath.

This tactic represents a useful tool in shifting blame towards China in international disputes. Regardless of whatever the other party does and whatever sufferings China has endured, it is always in the wrong because it won't tell its people about the Great Leap Forward. Any suggestion of western hegemony and attempts to weaken China are sidelined. All one needs to do is simply say that China is overly suspicious of the west since the CCP has kept the "humiliations alive" through its "patriotic education".

One war, two perspectives: China and the West today

Lovell doesn't stop at the Opium War. What could have been a unique work about an important historical event is bastardized largely by recourse to two disgraceful tactics: selectively quoting the most extremist Chinese netizens' reactions to prove a point, and by relating the Opium Wars and subsequent events to every aspect of China's current foreign policy.

The first habit is readily explained by noting that she writes regularly for The Economist. The second transgression however represents an acute lack of understanding of modern geopolitics. Towards the end of the book, she ventures into territory clearly outside her milieu - foreign policy and diplomacy. She desperately tries to relate recent events to China's patriotic eduction and suspicion. She argues that "delusion and prejudice have bedevilled (China's) relationship with the modern West." In other words, whenever China refuses to bow down to American hegemony and obey its commands, it is not because America is indeed inherently hegemonic in nature, but because China is unduly suspicious of the west.

Hence it transpires that when:
- America and the west try to push through a skewed climate deal at Copenhagen, or when it continues to break promises and sell weapons to Taiwan in the name of a pretend promise to defend it, China is wrong to feel victimized and targeted - it is simply its paranoia talking! How can the west do anything wrong when China treats everything the west does as suspicious? Perhaps it doesn't know that the west has always had China's best interests at heart.

She even manages to find parallels between the Copenhagen Climate Change conference and the Opium Wars. Lovell talks about that fateful day in December 2009 (an incident about which climate journalist Mark Lynas famously and publicly flipped his lid) when Wen Jiabao allegedly snubbed world leaders and "insulted Obama". She finds Wen Jiabao's absence from a meeting of World leaders

"...an ominous return to the style of pompous, sino-centric diplomacy that had so enraged men like William Napier and Harry Parkes in the run-up to the first and second Opium Wars, as the emperor's officials refused to meet him in person, delegating instead the hopeless Hong merchants."

Lovell fails to tell her readers that Wen Jiabao was in fact not even informed of the meeting by the conference organizers. Moreover, the fact that India, South Africa, and Brazil also vehemently opposed the west is also completely omitted. Perhaps those countries too wanted to seek revenge for their respective "humiliations".

All drug mules are equal, but British drug mules are more equal than others

She also spends more than a few paragraphs gloating over the curious case of Akmal Shaikh, the British drug mule sentenced to death in China for drug trafficking. Like The Economist, she speculates whether the (irrelevant but useful) fact that he was caught in Xinjiang (which had recently witnessed bloody ethnic riots) might have had an effect on Chinese citizens' reactions to the issue.

She extensively quotes media reports saying that Shaikh's family insisted that he was mentally ill, perhaps expecting a death convict's family to simply come out and say that he deserved to die. Perhaps she expects a drug smuggler to be given special treatment just because he is British. A simple open-and-shut case (even his own lawyers admitted that the evidence against him was overwhelming) was converted into something political by the media, and this was excellent fodder for people like Lovell to chew on in her interpretation of justice - that Akmal Shaikh was not given an independent medical examination and subsequently sentenced to death because of the "Opium War button".

In all fairness however, Julia Lovell's book is indeed more balanced than other western views about the Opium Wars in the west, and about European colonialism in general. The book represents an evolution in the study of the "useful episode" and the century that followed it - from blatant lopsidedness to a more nuanced approach. However, China thinks that "the west has always been full of schemes to undermine China" largely because the west has indeed been full of schemes to undermine China. China might be paranoid about the west, but that is only because the west gives it a lot to be paranoid about.

China doth protest too much?

The origin and centralization of the entire gamut of Chinese nationalism and foreign policy to a single point in Chinese history is something that looks particularly attractive. It can be a useful tool for the west to deflect criticism from their own devious policies. Whenever China takes a decision that suits its own national interest (as any country would) western governments and the media can simply press their own "Opium War buttons" and claim that China is being uncooperative because of its xenophobia. In the closing paragraphs of the book, Lovell brays,

"In 1839, the Qing court was too distracted by fears of social unrest to come up voluntarily with a pragmatic response to Western trade demands; Britain interpreted this political paralysis as inveterate xenophobia. In 2010, the situation did not look so very different..."

Portraying China as a pressure cooker about to burst and current Chinese foreign policy as being driven by ancient history is the prefect solution. It achieves two useful purposes: one, it demonizes China, and two, it sanctifies the west and portrays it as an angel - China's benefactor that can do no harm. Any Chinese foreign policy decision can be attacked - and any western action can be defended - all one has to do is to simply hint that China is being uncooperative due to its own xenophobia and historical bias.

Perhaps the Opium War was a useful episode after all.

[Dmitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very readable account of the First and Second Opium Wars. The author, a lecturer at the University of London, offers a blend of scholarly research and entertaining storytelling. Accomplishing both within the same covers is an unusual achievement. Lovell has a witty way of writing, without becoming glib or unsympathetic towards the often tragic circumstances described. If the reader is seeking a moral allegory embedded in past events, it may well be found in the folly of men.

One of the strong points of this work is that it includes both Opium Wars, instead of ending at the Treaty of Nanjing. Although known foremost as a cultural historian, Lovell offers a good overview of the military events without getting bogged down in minutiae. A description of the major battles may seem prerequisite, yet many books focus only on political and diplomatic aspects of the conflicts. These are covered as well, but are augmented with substantial discussion of the armed action.

Another strength is in its balanced critique of each side of the conflict. This may come from the author's command of both primary source languages, an affinity for China and her native Britain. It is not, as some have asserted, a merely anglocentric view of the period. The British were brutal and Chinese resistance proved futile, but there is much more here than these shopworn sermons betray. Beyond a fair assessment of the causes and results of the war, this is an enjoyable history.

The only criticism I have could also be seen as a virtue. There is a significant focus on the political permutations of Opium War historiography in an extended conclusion. This interesting aspect of the conflicts shows how propaganda was used by China and the West during the 20th century. It is important subject matter in its own right, but it somehow feels like a different book than the preceding historical narrative. Perhaps it would have worked better as an appendix.

[Tristram Shandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

Somewhere near the end of her intriguing monograph on The Opium War and its consequences for Sino-Western relations, Julia Lovell uses the well-known quotation from Orwell’s classic 1984, which once again made it clear to me how important it is to cultivate a critical understanding of history – and also of meta-history – and to try and get the facts straight in the first place (a demand which may be quite bold in the face of whatever meta-history teaches us). Lovell’s intention not only to give a detailed account on the First Opium War from 1839 to 1842, which ended with the first “Unequal Treaty” of Nanjing, but also to take a look at how the war shaped the way the West thought and still thinks of China and vice-versa and how it was eventually used by the Chinese nationalists and the CCP for propagandistic reasons, is also mirrored in the sub-title Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China.

In the first part of the book, Lovell gives us a detailed account of the prelude to the First Opium War and to the events of the actual war itself, and she does this from various angles, which also shows that neither the British nor the Chinese side should be thought of as monolithic blocs of interests. For all the bigotry on the British side, trying to dress up the original aim of avoiding a trade deficit by the export of opium from India with highfalutin claims of opening up a perversely arrogant and isolationist China to “the world”, also in the interests of thousands of Chinese subjects, there were also British voices who denounced the opium trade – even though technically, the British government had no hand in it – as a national shame and a large-scale crime. Lovell also shows how the question of whether the nation should go to war about the opium question became a (two-edged) sword in party politics between the Whigs and the Tories, and how quick many of the opponents were in changing sides once the British troops showed victorious in 1842. On the Chinese side, Lovell paints a picture of an emperor, whose underlings fed him with false reports or made their own deals with the English for the sake of their own political careers. Lovell also does away with one-sided portraits of men like Charles Elliot, Superintendent of Trade in China and the first British plenipotentiary in China, who was definitely not the jingoistic demon that contemporary Chinese historiography makes him out to be, or Lin Zexu, whose fight against opium was not totally motivated by his desire to keep China free from the drug but also by more profane career thinking on his own behalf. All in all, her presentation of the events in question shows that history works in many hues of grey.

The second part of her book, Chapters 15 to 19, starting with a rather sketchy overview over the second Opium War, explores how this conflict shaped western-Chinese relations and also became an important tool in the hands of both Chinese nationalists (like Sun Yat-Sen) and communists in their attempts at creating an awareness among Chinese people of China as a nation being exploited, tricked and undermined by the west. In this context, it was interesting for me to read that Chinese contemporaries of the First Opium War never really thought of the conflict as a war but regarded it as a rebellion of the English against the authority of the Qing dynasty. Only in the decades to come was the term “war” applied to England’s military strike against the Chinese Empire. Towards the end of the book, Lovell also points out that Communist endeavours to whip up their people’s nationalist feelings against “the west” may easily reach the tipping point of getting out of control and making people criticize their own government for its cooperation with the west. Personally, I was very intrigued by Lovell’s chapter on the “Yellow Peril”, which shows that large parts of public opinion in Britain were very much opposed to the opium trade and that the British public also had a bad conscience with regard to the enforced import of the drug into China. However, this bad conscience did not eventually lead to a more emphatic and benevolent attitude towards China, but on the contrary, it drove many British people to think of the Chinese as a dark and vengeful threat because after all that had been done to the Chinese, would it not be perfectly normal for them to lust for revenge and to poison the “innocent” British with the help of opium in their turn?

Apart from the facts and developments Lovell presents, she also has a knack for writing in an extremely, yet unobtrusively witty style, placing a wry comment here and there to show the absurdity of certain decisions or arguments. This is often neither here nor there but makes for a delightful reading experience, as for example when she comments on the great humbug Marx:

”Despite the chaos of his own circumstances, Marx retained a robust belief in his ability to pronounce on the affairs of the world.”

Furthermore, the book is very reader-friendly in that it includes an overview of people playing a central role in the Opium Wars or in their historiographical reception as well as a chronology of major events dealt with by Lovell. All in all, this book can be read and understood also by those readers whose knowledge on the Opium Wars and on Chinese history is sketchy – after all, I had no problems following the author’s thoughts –, and yet it provides deep-going and differentiated insight into the topic. After reading it, I will certainly keep the author on my radar.

[Qiong · Rating 3 out of 5]

I waited a day to write this review. I needed time to sort out my thoughts on it.

I liked it, generally. Especially chapters that focused on the Opium War itself. How and when it started, what China and Britain was like respectively prior to the war. Lovell's outstanding knowledge and grasp on the whole incident totally blew my mind.

But, yeah, here comes the but, which is also why I only gave the book three stars. I didn't like the conclusion part so much. Or rather, I don't agree with Lovell's interpretation of it.

To quote:
"Influential nineteenth-century Britons worked hard to fabricate a virtuous casus belli out of an elementary problem of trade deficit: to reinvent the war as a clash of civilizations triggered by the 'unnaturally' isolationist Chinese. Joining this blame game, twentieth-century Chinese nation -- builders in turn transformed it into the cause of all their country's troubles: into a black imperialist scheme to enslave a united, heroically resisting China."

And what do I make of this statement? I think Lovell has largely over-simplified the Opium War. True, the war started as nothing other than an elementary problem of trade deficit. But to deny the clash between two civilizations it signified beneath it is a little strange. Because it was a clash. It was the beginning of a series of clashes ensuing this very first one. From 1839 to 1842, Britain had gone through industrial revolution, was way ahead of China in many ways, whilst China was a very much closed nation, indulging itself in its old-time grand stupefying dreams. From an evolutionist point of view, it was only a matter of time before the stronger waged a 'challenge' to the weak, rather than whether it would happen or not.

The way I see it, it is very important to think by yourself while reading history. Whoever controls the past, controls the history; whoever controls the present, controls the past. Even history can be used. Was China a victim during the Opium War or not? To answer this question, we need to agree on what "China" it refers to here. If by China, you mean thousands of Chinese people, who died, suffered in the war, then yes. Yes, there is no denying that China was indeed a victim. But if by China you mean Qing dynasty? Or today's CCP? Then no. Qing dynasty was moribund, and for a very large part, its own impotence incurred everything. As for CCP? It didn't even exist when the war happened. It would be poorly self-justified to claim reprimand for it.

Maybe, just maybe, since the Chinese people who were actually eligible to speak up have long been dead, today's China needs a spokesperson after all. But that shall be left to them. They speak for themselves, which seems the only fair thing to do.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating account of the first Opium War and its consequences in China through to the present day. It overturns much of the self serving PRC historiography that saw the country’s defeat as the result of a cunning imperialist conspiracy. Actually the British were (as usual) more worried about the money and the Qing dynasty simply too inept and dysfunctional to resist a modern military. Even though the conduct of say the Belgians in the Congo or the Germans in southwest Africa was far more disturbing, this was not the British Empire’s finest hour and many UK contemporaries were horrified at what was being done. The ramifications of the war are still with us and have to some degree shaped Chinese views of the West as well as providing a handy nationalist distraction from the self inflicted horrors of the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square massacre etc. As with Afghanistan, our imperial adventures are remembered in other parts of the world long after we’ve forgotten them.

[Joseph Sciuto · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say? Before picking up Julia Lovell's novel "The Opium War," I knew virtually nothing about the subject and the little I did know was wrong. After finishing the novel I came away with a greater understanding , not only of the Opium Wars (there were two) but the Chinese mentality, the British greed, and the isolation of the Chinese Empire and their emperors.

The British introduced the drug to the Chinese, and the Chinese were ready participants. The Opium came from the country (British colony) of India where it was harvested and grew rapidly. The British who had always wanted to open trade with the huge landmass called China, invaded ports along the coast and set up trading stations.

In many of these port cities the trade was mutually beneficial to the Chinese and the Queen of England who could never possess enough money or land. But the biggest return came from the sale of opium and just because the Chinese emperor saw the harm it was costing his citizens...making them lazy and completely incompetent...did not deter the British desire to trade the opium with all willing buyers.

After the Chinese destroyed millions of dollars of British opium, war broke out. What would follow was like a Woody Allen comedy and I had to remind myself that hundreds of thousands of innocent Chinese citizens, men, women, and children were killed or committed suicide. The Chinese were no match for the British. Yes, The Chinese build forts that housed hundreds of soldiers, and manned cannons atop the forts but the cannons were stationary and the British had no problem destroying the forts as many Chinese soldiers simply fled.

At one point, A Chinese official in charge of military operations collected all the female chamber pots, put them on a boat, and send the boat toward a towering ship of war in hope that the smell and magical blood of the females would be enough to ward off the British advances. It didn't work.

The first half of this book is a little difficult to get through because of all the names and the insanity, but the second half of the book was a real joy as the author dissects the way future Chinese governments would portray the Opium Wars as a imperialistic drive by western nations to take over the entire country.

Mao used it to his advantage and in so doing killed 30 million innocent Chinese men, women, and children. After his death, future communist governments used the Opium Wars as a way to get the citizens to mistrust the Western Nations; even though at the same time they were building relations and trading partners with any western nations that wanted to trade with them.

This is a really informative novel and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of China. Thanks to my friend Dmitri for recommending this book.

[zed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative and a sometimes riveting narrative style delivery but verged at times to sarcasm aimed at both the Chinese and the British. No doubt deserved but maybe a little too obvious for my liking. I would add that the 2nd Opium War received one far too short chapter.
The final couple of chapters, consisting of discussion on how the Chinese used the Opium Wars for propaganda purposes, was interesting but were far too long when there was a very good story of the entire wars to be told. Maybe the author had lost patience with the original story. A very good timeline, good footnotes and an excellent bibliography finished a good if flawed book.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. Lovell goes in-depth on chronicling the (First) Opium War, before zooming out and examining how both Western and Chinese perspectives and history deals with its legacy. The narrative structure of the conflict is really easy to read, while the analysis of modern China, and Chinese people’s view on the war influence diplomacy in our time. Well nearly our time, I believe it was published in 2010-11.

While Lovell clearly states her reasons why in the introduction, I really wish there was a similar look into the Second Opium War. She does tell us what happens, but it’s consigned to only a chapter or two, whereas around twelve are spent leading up and covering the first. Besides that though, not really any complaints; it is well written, researched, and compelling.

Definitely recommend for anyone interested in either Chinese history or modern China!

[Steven · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honestly? I didn't get past the introduction.
The book opens with a preface about a 2010 embassy to China by David Cameron, the British PM. Being November, many in the British delegation were wearing poppies on their lapels for Remembrance Day. A Chinese official allegedly requested that the delegation remove the poppies, "on the grounds that the flowers evoked painful memories of the Opium War fought between Britain and China from 1939 to 1842" (p. ix)
Author's assessment of this? "Someone in China's official welcoming party had, it seemed, put considerable effort into feeling offended on behalf of his or her 1.3 billion countrymen (for one thing, Remembrance Day poppies are clearly modeled on field, not opium, poppies)." She goes on to say that Chinese internet "has been home to an oversensitive nationalism".
Well, I was offended by the author's "oversensitive nationalism". She totally dismisses the legitimacy of the request - but, heck, they're only Asians, right Ms. Lovell? The level of cultural insensitivity is stunning.
Then, in the Introduction, she proposes that the Opium War narrative is just something the Chinese Communist Party used to gin up nationalist feeling.
The paragraph that made me decide this was not the book for me:
“The PRC’s state media work hard to convince readers and viewers that modern China is the story of the Chinese people’s heroic struggles against ‘imperialism and its running dogs’. (In reality, the story of modern China could probably be told just as convincingly as a history of collusion with ‘imperialism and its running dogs’; China has about as rich a tradition of collaboration with foreigners as any as any country that has suffered regular invasion and occupation.) But self-loathing and introspection, rather than the quest for foreign scapegoats, have dominated China’s efforts to modernize. Eyewitness Chinese accounts of the first Opium War blamed the empire’s defeat not on external aggression but on the disorganization and cowardice of its own officials and armies.”
Maybe Ms. Lovell addresses British imperialism and exploitation of a disorganized Chinese regime at some point, and maybe the rest of the book is more even handed, but the opening is so biased in favor of British (white) superiority, I'm not hanging around to find out.
Diappointed.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Opium War started with Britain's addiction to tea and China's rigid attitude towards trade (they wouldn't accept anything but silver in exchange for the popular leaves).

The huge consumption of tea by its citizens put the British state deep in the red. Britain needed to claw back its money or go bust. And Opium, which had become popular in China during the three preceding decades, was the perfect product to do it with.

As Britain peddled more and more Opium into Canton (which was sold under monopoly by the British East India Company), the Chinese authorities saw the social rot it caused and, on the orders of the Emperor, illegalized it. This brought the two sides into full confrontation.

This book is an exposition of the causes, effects and outcomes of the two Opium Wars. It gives a deep insight into the British and Chinese psyche in the 17th Century. And goes a long way to explain the clash of cultures that occurred then - and that still remains, to a large extent, today.

[Raghu Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

George Orwell wrote in his landmark book, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, “Who controls the present, controls the past….” The Chinese Communists apply this principle well in their projection of the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century into modern Chinese history. In China today, it was the Opium wars that began the ‘century of humiliation’ China endured at the hands of Western imperialism and Japanese fascism. China was the victim because of its economic and military weakness and internal squabbles. Then, the communists won power in 1949, ending the humiliation and setting China on the road to modernization. History books, TV documentaries and museums teach this version of history to China’s children and the general populace. However, western historians have a different interpretation of the same events. They believe the opium wars happened because Britain wanted to expand free trade deep into China away from the limited Canton trading system. Others say Britain fought the war to solve a trade deficit problem. Yet others say it was colonial arrogance and military might which led to the wars because Britain would not brook any opposition to their lucrative opium trade. In this book, author Julia Lovell delineates the causes of the first Opium war in 1839-42, how Britain won a decisive victory and exacted discomfiting concessions from China. Her coverage of the second Opium war, the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the rise of Republican China is brief. The book ends with how communist China today has painted the opium wars to suit its goals by whipping up nationalist pride and hostility towards the West and Japan. The principal contribution of the author is to bust the myths peddled by both China and Britain about the Opium wars, its causes and role in modern Chinese history.

Before we discuss the author’s analysis, let us capture the events that led to the Opium wars and their aftermath. By the early 19th century, Britain’s addiction to tea imported twenty-three million pounds of tea each year at a cost of 3.6 million pounds of silver. The China trade was draining silver out of England. The British East India Company blamed China for preventing the export of British goods and balance their imports of tea and porcelain. They needed a commodity other than silver to trade for tea and porcelain. Opium was the answer because they grew it in large quantities after capturing Bengal in India in 1757. Starting with 140,000 pounds of opium in 1773, Britain flooded China with 5.6 million pounds of opium by 1839. The detrimental effects of the drug on their economy and people alarmed the Qing emperors. Its authorities blocked the opium carrying ships and demanded handing over the entire cargo. These were ships of the British East India Company and hence the British Crown saw their blockade as an affront to Britain. In a classic colonial era response, they set out to teach a lesson to China. The result was the first Opium War, lasting three years until 1842. It ended in a humiliating defeat for China, forcing them to sign the Treaty of Nanjing. The treaty abolished the restrictions imposed under the Canton Trade system and forced the Qing rulers to open four more ports in Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai for trade. China agreed to pay an indemnity of 20 million silver dollars and adhere to a fixed schedule of customs duties. Besides, the British got the right to occupy Hong Kong in perpetuity. In the new treaty ports, Christian missionaries brought their religion to the Chinese and proselytized.

However, the Qing government failed to adhere to the terms of the Nanjing treaty in practice. Britain, France, Russia and the United States were trading with China and got dissatisfied with their inability to open the lucrative markets of China further. Britain and France attacked China again in 1856, forcing the second opium war. Their military superiority crushed China again, resulting in new treaties with all the four powers. It opened eleven more ports for trade along the Chinese coast, Taiwan, Hainan island, and along the Yangtze River in the interior. It set a new, low tariff for imported goods, giving foreign traders an important advantage. Foreign entrepreneurs and missionaries could travel and conduct business all over China. It gave Russia control over a non-freezing region on the Pacific coast, where they founded the city of Vladivostok in 1860. China lost 1.5 million sq. kms of territory from the treaty.

Julia Lovell says the Opium war has cast a shadow on Sino-Western relations for the past 170 years and continues to do so. She blames both sides for tampering with history to suit their purposes. In her analysis, Britain had a trade deficit problem with China in paying silver for tea and porcelain. So, they demanded better terms of trade. In 1839, fears of social unrest distracted the Qing court to come up with a pragmatic response to these demands. It was just political paralysis in China, but Britain saw it as inveterate xenophobia. So, they waged war to settle it and change the terms of trade. One aim was to legitimize the trade of a narcotic such as opium. However, this brought a moral dilemma to Victorian Britain. To cover it up, Britain fabricated a virtuous ‘casus belli’ and cast the opium war as a clash of civilizations, triggered by the xenophobic and isolationist Chinese. They recast the war as a necessity to expand free trade in China that was beneficial to all.

The Chinese narrative of the Opium wars is even worse. The Communist Party paints the opium wars as a dark, imperialist conspiracy to enslave a united, heroic and resistant China. They smooth over the deep fault-lines of the multi-ethnic Qing empire and the failure of the Manchu rulers to rally its Han officials, soldiers and subjects. Nor do they mention that the Cantonese traders were happy trading with foreigners and even helped Britain during the opium wars. Lovell says the Communist Party brought immense death and destruction to China’s people through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the Tien-an-men massacre. This has jolted their credibility as rulers, forcing them to deflect the people’s attention and refocus the cause of China’s recent historical troubles. They seek to bolster their legitimacy by ‘controlling the past’ in Orwellian style, using the Opium Wars as the beginning and cause of all China’s modern-day troubles.

Despite the Communist Party’s attempts at rewriting history as ‘a hundred years of humiliation’, Lovell documents a more balanced view from the people of China in the nineteenth century. Western science inspired political scholars like Yan Fu in China in the nineteenth century. Fu believed China must recognize its flaws and correct them with ideas and culture borrowed from the West. He proclaimed China was ignorant, poor and corrupt, while Europe was aggressive, intelligent and patriotic. The West was not superior because of its steam engines and weaponry but because they seek “truth in learning” and “justice in politics.” Yan Fu believed this gave Europe global supremacy. A young Cantonese scholar called Liang Qichao echoed similar views a decade later. He concluded it was China’s corruption, selfishness, isolation, ignorance, and conservatism that caused its downfall. The West was superior because of its institutions, like the parliament and the press. Author Lovell says that even today’s young Chinese have the same admiration for Japan and the West and their advances in science and technology. In a discussion, they might rant about western exploitation and Japanese imperialism. Almost always they would follow by denouncing Qing-era China and its people for their weakness and addiction to opium as the causes for the country’s humiliation. They would invariably end in denouncing the Communist rulers as a gang of traitors and exploiters.

However, China was not alone in self-examination. To Britain’s credit, Victorian Britain was uncomfortable with fighting a war to push an addictive, illegal narcotic on the Chinese population. Parliament member William Gladstone criticised it as “a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace”. Others found no honor in a war where 69 men died on the British side while China lost somewhere between 20000 to 25000 men. However, the book does not discuss whether the British Empire was a partial ‘narco-state’ in the mid-nineteenth century. At its height, the third highest source of income for British India was opium, after salt and land. As some Western authors have suggested, was the British East India Company a drug cartel, posing as a joint stock corporation, masquerading as a government?

The Qing Dynasty viewed opium with great concern, just as the US viewed its ‘drug menace’ in the 1970s. However, the Chinese in the mid-nineteenth century were more self-critical and impartial towards the opium trade than the American public and ruling classes have been in the twentieth century. China’s anti-opium campaigners were reluctant to blame their opium habit solely on Britain. They believed it was Chinese weakness which seduced them into the habit. People in provinces like Sichuan wouldn’t even accept opium as a foreign commodity because local production had long outstripped imports. In contrast, the US engaged in a ‘war on drugs’, believing it to be a menace created by the drug cartels in South America. There has been less self-criticism of the drug-addiction of Americans and some of their irrational attitudes toward recreational drugs. It has resulted in a lot of violence and expenditure, incarceration of minorities with little impact on the drug addiction of Americans.

Julia Lovell closes the book with a warning to Western policymakers. She says the idea that the West is central to China’s calculations and actions has endured in the West since colonial times. This is a misconception. The truth, in her view, is that China’s rulers have always preoccupied themselves with domestic affairs, rather than foreign relations. This was true in the nineteenth century and true now. The refusal to look at matters from the perspective of the Chinese state’s prerogatives drove Britain towards war in 1839. She warns the same refusal risks the West pushing relations towards confrontation in the early twenty-first century. This is a critical observation. However, it has also a flip side which the author does not mention. China’s rulers are even more susceptible to this fault. Any dictatorship is in danger of drowning in its own lies and deceptions. China’s rulers are more likely to misread the West’s intentions and prepare for war, believing in the hype of their own falsifications of their Opium War history. Perhaps China is the weaker party and hence unlikely to confront. But the Chinese leaders could believe China has arrived on the world stage and is equal or superior to the West. If so, they could make the mistake of raising the confrontation to war.

A thought-provoking book on a part of modern Chinese history.

[Shane Parrish · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book describes the mid-19th century conflict between Great Britain and China and the reverberations that remain to this day. From the official summary: "Beginning with the dramas of the war itself, Julia Lovell explores its causes and consequences and, through this larger narrative, interweaves the curious stories of opium’s promoters and attackers. The Opium War is both the story of China’s first conflict with the West and an analysis of the country’s contemporary self-image. It explores how China’s national myths mold its interactions with the outside world, how public memory is spun to serve the present; and how delusion and prejudice have bedeviled its relationship with the modern West."

The history of this conflict is a clear example of how we often use history to justify our present ideas, and how an event can be imbued with different meanings. If you want to gain a different perspective on our current geo-political reality, Lovell's book on this obscure conflict certainly provides one.

[Max]

Lovell's well-written and masterfully researched THE OPIUM WAR undercuts much received wisdom about the War, its causes, and its effects.

For example: Lin Zexu, the Qing official celebrated for seizing and burning illegal shipments of British opium in Guangdong in 1839, is commonly described as an anti-opium crusader; Lovell makes a good case from contemporary sources that Lin was in fact a driven Qing official hoping a successful resolution of the opium problem would lead to his being promoted to a position from which he could achieve his final goal of improving grain shipments to the capitol.

Or: the standard line on the financial situation underpinning the Opium War is that the British were running a heavy trade deficit with China (England needed tea and silk, and wasn't offering much in trade except silver), and so started shipping opium from India. This turned the deficit in the other direction, and China started losing immense quantities of silver on the opium trade, thus destabilizing the national economy—so the Qing government outlawed opium and dispatched Lin Zexu to break up the import market. But, Lovell points out, opium imports rose dramatically after the war, and yet the Qing economy remained stable. Turns out the silver pinch the Qing felt in the 1830s was brought on by a contraction in global silver supply due in part to revolutions and unrest in South America and Mexico, which produced something like 80% of the world's silver at the time.

The book's full of little turns like this, opening the standard narrative of the war like a dreamcatcher to reveal new sides and perspectives to the history in question. I'm not sure I would have enjoyed it quite so much if I didn't have a reasonable background in the "received history" of the struggle, from books like Jack Beaching's The Opium War and (for more general information about Western trading and missionary activities) Jonathan Spence's To Change China.

Lovell's account is strongest in its primary focus on the First Opium War. She covers the Second Opium War in a bit of a rush—focusing on a few highlights like the sacking of the Summer Palace, in comparison to her archival depth on the First War—and her chapters on reactions to the Wars jump around a great deal in time. I don't think this is a problem, exactly, but it may be confusing to readers unfamiliar with 19th century Chinese history. That said, her final chapter, tracing the evolution of modern China's history / propaganda industry post-June 1989, is a brilliant summary of her book's themes.

The Opium Wars were important and weird. A handful of expats, missionaries, and drug smugglers cheated, shot, and conned their way to conquest. The technological disparities between the British and Qing war machines in 1840 were so great that many of the military conflicts in this book read like Independence Day. If you want a terrifying vision of what contact with technologically advanced aliens who think of themselves as "the good guys" would look like, this is your book. (Another of Lovell's compelling inversions: her argument that the Yellow Peril narrative is at root fueled by British / Western anxiety and guilt over the one-sided indefensibility of the Opium Wars.)

Midway through reading this book, I decided to look up what happened to Jardine & Matheson, the import-export business formed by the two arch-warmongering drug smugglers of 1840s Guangdong, prime instigators of the Opium Wars. Turns out it still exists. There's a website. (http://www.jardines.com/) Its Board of Directors includes a man named "Lord Leach of Kildare."

Reality is a strange and terrifying place.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Daoguang emperor was the Manchu Qing ruler of China during the first Opium War. But "[t]wo and a half years after this war was supposed to have started, Daoguang found himself still lacking the most basic information about his antagonists: where in fact, he wondered in a communication of May 1842, is England? Why are the English selling us opium? What are the Indians doing in their army? How is it they have a twenty-two-year-old woman for a queen? Is she married?"

All good questions. "Millions of ounces of silver had been squandered on a war whose cause Qing officials could no longer remember - if indeed they had ever understood it." I could sympathize. I know the who, when, where, and how, but am not especially clear on the what and why. Fortunately there's no test.

There was much bloodshed by firearms in the Opium Wars but even more alarming was all the slicing that seemed to go on in 19th century China. Heads were constantly being chopped off and paraded on poles.

"On reporting a rumor that Qishan was to be sawn in half for his role in the reviled treaty, The Times commented that 'Eliot's head, trunk, and limbs should be made into a thousand cylindrical sections, as a warning to all his family.'"

A particularly bloodthirsty imperial commissioner, Yuqian, in 1841 "captured an English captain who had mistakenly landed on Zhoushan with supplies for the already departed forces. The man, Stead, was tied up and publicly sliced to death, his head displayed to the masses. A few months later, an English captain and Indian sailor from an opium boat were taken prisoner. The captain, while still alive, had his arms and back flayed (Yuqian had the skin fashioned into reins for his horse), then was sliced to death. The Indian was treated more mercifully, his head being flayed...only after it had been removed from his body."

Local populations would occasionally carry off British soldiers and do creative things with them. "A captured private was found tied up in a bag: 'a large walnut, with hair wound round it, had been forced into his mouth, the sides of which were cut to admit it. He was quite dead.'"

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found myself interested in the Opium War(s) after reading "All the Tea in China," a narrative of the British industrial espionage surrounding stealing the means to grow and process tea from China in India. I did not understand the connection between tea, opium, and the East India Company's loss of their monopoly on the China trade. Once I gained understanding of the tea/opium/East India Company connection I wanted to know more about the Opium War(s) itself.

Lovell's work on the Opium War is amazing. The author had gained access to Chinese archives of the period surrounding the war (1838-1860-ish) and used them to very good effect. Her coverage of the causes of the war, the people involved, their strengths and weaknesses, and the outcomes is thorough and engaging, a rarity in many works of this scope and nature.

I was particularly pleased that Lovell continued to examine the effects of the war into the 20th and 21st centuries. Those effects continue to reverberate in some very unexpected ways.

I also found it interesting that Lovell sees the two incidents of opium war as one event separated by two decades of uneasy peace. Most every other work on this subject refer to "wars" rather than "war" and Lovell does a very good job of showing why they are one event rather than two.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

If Lovell had distilled the section of the first Opium War and covered in the same amount of detail the second war, this would have been a highly readable and enjoyable account. Instead, she has crammed in too many tangents and expanded the scope of the book beyond what allows for a natural flow. Depictions of racist attitudes towards the Chinese and opium dens in early 20th century England are but two examples of how Lovell deviates wildly from anything remotely related to the war. The result is a disjointed book that meanders laboriously on and on to present-day China; where tenuous threads are linked back unconvincingly to the Opium War in an effort to prove why that episode in China's history still matters.

While the book as a whole falls flat, full marks goes to Lovell for her well-researched portrayal of the first Opium War. Utilising English and Chinese sources, her scholarship is on full display as she carefully guides the reader through some complex history. Had she retained her focus on the topic at hand, The Opium War would have been a far more superior effort.

[Rajiv Chopra · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, "Opium War", by Julia Lovell, is brilliant. However, "Opium Inc." is another good companion book.

The book focuses on The First Opium War. Julia Lovell starts with a background of the Qing Empire and the steady degradation of the king. Conditions in China were unstable. The traders were making money off opium, and the courtiers routinely gave false information to the king. Conversely, you had a ravenous British Crown looking for revenue. Opium.

She covers huge ground in the book, revealing Chinese weakness, British duplicity and warmongering, and the debates that raged in England around opium.

Then, she skipped past the next wars and wrote about the fall of the Qing Empire and the rise of Chinese Nationalism and its memory of the wars.

The Chinese have long memories, and, as she says, the memories of the Century of Humiliation live on in China.

An excellent book, one for the keeping.

[Jolie Lau · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book's central thesis was interesting - it argues that in both the 19th century and modern times, the West often misinterprets China's actions as direct hostility. In reality, China was (and is) mostly focused on internal challenges. During the Opium War, it was about maintaining stability as a country ruled by minorities. Today, it's about managing an aging population without economic collapse while continuing to use imperial oppression as a scapegoat for its current failures.

The content was informative, but I found the pacing disjointed. About 80% of the book was devoted to travel logs of diplomats and commissioners, along with day-to-day recounts of conversations between emperors and ambassadors. While interesting, it sometimes felt like it bogged down the narrative. The book read like two separate works merged together: one a detailed record of the First Opium War, and the other focused on the author's thesis about the creation of modern China.

One disappointment was the limited coverage of Hong Kong's cession and its relationship to the Opium War. Given its historical significance, I expected more depth on this topic.

[Victor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eine dichte und anspruchsvolle Aufarbeitung des Themas. Tiefgreifend und thesenstark, sowie in der rezeptionsgeschichtlich-politischen Analyse außerordentlich scharfsinnig.

[Ondra Soukup · Rating 4 out of 5]

Consise history of Opium Wars And Its changing perception in Chinese society.

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read chapters of this book in researching a novel which features the second Opium War. It's fascinating to see how the opium trade in the Victorian era impacted politics and international relations. Essentially the catalyst for starting a second war was to further establish free trade. This book is full of interesting factoids and characters; did you know that the Arrow War was the first war to be documented by a photographer, Felix Beato? I got a lot from referring to Lovell's end notes and bibliography as a good jumping point for further research.

[Michael Keerdo-Dawson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and addictive history of a deeply embarrassing chapter of British history. Lovell is equally scathing of both the British and Chinese in this story and very rarely is there a character in this history who does not meet with some of her witty cynicism. Highly detailed and when there is dispute about the truth she always presents both sides.

[Julian Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

All the history you didn't get taught at school in England as it isn't quite cricket. She brilliantly brings this story to life in a thoroughly enjoyable read.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

For example, it was during the period surrounding the Opium Wars that the West's opinion of China changed to a vast, homogenuous, insular and static despotic state. Basically, the sick man of the East. China's rejection of free-trade was deemed archaic and backward, its insistence on pomp and ritual affronted British honor because it put Britain in a subordinate position, its destruction of private property was also an affront to British honor, and because of all these things Britain was justified in imposing their will on the Chinese state through military force.
The problem with that conception of the Qing state is that it is quite untrue, and I think that conception of Imperial China, and possibly even China today has stuck with us.
Perhaps even British detractors would have changed their minds, if they had taken the trouble to look at a map, or study a little history. Far from a community turned in on itself, Qing China was a vast, multi-ethnic jigsaw of lands and peoples. British opinion- and policy-makers of the 1830s made the mistake of – or deliberately deceived themselves into – simplifying the territory they called China into a complacent unity: an obstinate duelling partner from whom satisfaction must be extracted. It was nothing of the sort. This was an empire that could not even agree upon a single word for itself – changing shape and name according to whichever dynastic house happened to have acquired it.

Before the nineteenth-century closing of the Western mind on China, a visitor touring the palaces of the Qing dynasty would have found it hard to fathom the self-identity of its ruling house. The story of the Qing is of a great colonial enterprise, in which a Manchurian conquest minority somehow kept in check for over two and a half centuries a great patchwork of other ethnic groups: Chinese, Mongolians, Tibetans.

In old age, Qianlong styled himself the ‘Old Man of the Ten Utter Victories’, generating some 1,500 poems and essays commemorating his wars, to be scratched (in the several languages incorporated into the Qing conquest – Chinese, Manchu, Mongol, Arabi, Uighur) onto hundreds of monumental war memorials littered across the empire.
In 1670, therefore, the warlike Kangxi emperor had reinvented himself as a hearth-and-home Confucian, indoctrinating his millions of new subjects in the philosopher’s submissive virtues of obedience, loyalty, thrift and hard work.

When it came to governing the peoples of Inner Asia, Qing rulers reinvented themselves, in turn, as the descendants of Genghis Khan, as patrons of Tibetan Lamaism, as secretive earthly mediators with the Buddhist spirit guide of the dead – all in the interests of wielding spiritual (and therefore political) power over Tibet and Mongolia. Qianlong advertised himself not only as the Confucian Son of Heaven and the Khan of Khans, but also as the messianic ‘wheel-turning king’ (cakravartin) of Tibetan Buddhist scripture, whose virtuous conquests were rolling the world on towards salvation..

As for the famous Macartney Embassy:

But Qianlong wanted little to do with George III’s demands for free-trading rights in China and for a permanent British embassy in Beijing. ‘We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures’, Qianlong explained in his official response to the British king – a communication that has subsequently become shorthand for Qing China’s delusions of supremacy over the rest of the globe.14 China, Macartney concluded, was ‘an old crazy first rate man-of-war’ fated to be ‘dashed to pieces on the shore’.15 Macartney’s failure – disseminated soon after his return in the published diary of his travels, and in the peevish travel memoirs of his entourage – edged British public opinion on China closer towards the shorter-tempered nineteenth-century vision of an arrogant, ritual-obsessed empire that had to be blasted ‘with a couple of frigates’ into the modern, civilized world of free trade.16

Again, however, the Qing world would probably not have recognized itself in Britain’s caricature. Far from self-sufficient, Qing China was fully – vulnerably – dependent on international commerce to bring in the essentials of existence: rice, pepper, sugar, copper and wood from south-east Asia, Taiwan, Japan and Korea; and New World silver to pay its taxes, and therefore government and armies.17 Early nineteenth-century European travellers around China’s fringes reported the population’s eagerness for trade and for foreign goods – wool, opium, even Bible tracts. Neither did Chinese merchants wait passively for useful items to come their way from abroad. Instead, China’s booming population spilled across the seas in search of business and labouring opportunities (boatbuilding, sawmilling, mining, pawnbroking, hauling), mostly in south-east Asia, Ceylon or Africa; a handful (of barbers, scholars, Christian converts) straggled out as far as France, Italy, Portugal, Mexico. Only a state of emergency would persuade the authorities to shut down maritime trade. During the war to recover Taiwan from Ming loyalists in 1661, Kangxi shifted coastal populations twenty miles inland, to starve out the island; the ban was promptly rescinded in 1684, once the breakaway regime had been ousted. A 1740 Dutch massacre in Batavia of more than 10,000 Chinese residents did not offer sufficient cause to ban trade – and neither, for long, did the outbreak of the Opium War.

So if the British simply wanted to trade, Qianlong pointed out in his reply to George III, they already could do so, down at Canton – which many of them quite contentedly were doing.
It was true, nonetheless, that the Qing state was far more devoted to regulating the European than it was the Asian junk trade. And a discontented British minority concluded from the limits imposed on them a general principle of Qing xenophobia. More careful consideration of the matter would have revealed a political design behind the entire scheme. European sailors of the two centuries before Macartney’s arrival had not been on their best behaviour when approaching the Chinese coast. The Portuguese, the first Europeans to make a concerted effort to penetrate mainland China under the Ming dynasty, had barged undiplomatically up to Canton – building a fort, buying Chinese children, trading at will. The first British merchant to introduce himself memorably to the Chinese authorities was one Captain John Weddell who, in 1637, similarly forced his way up to Canton aspiring to ‘do all the spoils . . . [he] could unto the Chinois.’20

While deliberating on how to handle the Macartney embassy, the Qing court pondered accounts of the British absorption of India. ‘Among the western ocean states, England ranks foremost in strength’, Qianlong secretly communicated to his Grand Minister. ‘It is said that the English have robbed and exploited the merchant ships of the other western ocean states so that the foreigners along the western ocean are terrified of their brutality.’21 The British, the emperor observed, were ever-ready to take advantage of slack military discipline on the coast. The accuracy of Qianlong’s assessment of British ambitions in Asia would be borne out by the events of 1839–42 and beyond.
I think this paragraph is really interested. It gives clear evidence that the Qing court knew what Britain was doing in India, knew that they were subjugating it through force and robbing them of wealth. Their experience with other European merchants did not put them in a good light either, so is it any surprise that China regulated the trade? That they were far more regulated than the Asian trade (which was basically free-trade)? They were legitimately concerned about their security and were obviously keyed into what Britain was doing at the time and keyed into foreign affairs. Hardly the mark of a insular, arrogant and dismissive country. They wanted to regulate and keep tabs on the British for their own security based on their actions in the pacific and their relations with them as merchants and diplomats.

I think this next paragraph will explain why the Qianlong Emperor made that famous remark:

Qianlong’s lofty public denial of interest in ingenious foreign articles (belied by his French, Tibetan and Mongol residences, by his profusion of exquisite European ‘spheres, orreries, clocks and musical automatons’ that, Macartney noted, made the British gifts ‘shrink from the comparison’) is perhaps best understood as part of a careful strategy of imperialist control. The emperor was informing a potential rival of his determination to define and monitor his empire’s need for ideas and objects.23 His rhetoric suggests an insular overconfidence in his empire’s possessions and achievements. His contrasting actions – his collections of exotic artefacts and religions, his expansionist campaigns – reveal an aggressive interest in the outside world.

The Qing appetite for foreign languages, objects and ideas grew directly out of the preoccupation with security that nineteenth-century European accounts read as xenophobia. Emperors made excellent diplomatic use of their own cosmopolitanism: ‘when the rota of Mongols, Muslims and Tibetans come every year to the capital for audience,’ proclaimed the sexalingual Qianlong emperor, ‘I use their own languages and do not rely on an interpreter . . . to conquer them by kindness.’24 They used Manchu to correspond secretly with distant officers in the field, outside Chinese lines of communication. Well aware of the political uses of multilingualism, the Qing did its best to prevent non-resident Europeans from acquiring Chinese and Manchu, and therefore the means to communicate independently with the native population:
So, Qianlong was basically speaking tough, acting powerful and the like, but people easily accepted this at face-value, even though mounds of evidence spoke to the contrary, because it fit the new view of China, a view that would allow Britain to 'legitimately' make war on China.

n short, the British made an error of judgement in assessing their first, influential encounter with high Qing diplomacy in 1793, allowing the ceremonial facade of the tribute system to obscure the pragmatic reality of Qing foreign policy. According to the tributary ideal, no ruler of China ever needed to lift a finger against its neighbours as – mesmerized by the glitter of Confucian civilization – all would voluntarily prostrate themselves before the Son of Heaven. The great military enterprises of the Qing dynasty tell a different story: this was an ambitious conquest backed by all available technical or political means – Central Asian, Confucian, Tibetan, European – of securing the resulting empire. As a result, by the start of the nineteenth century, it becomes remarkably difficult to define what European observers so confidently called China. What we have instead is a cross-bred state, held together by coercive cosmopolitanism: by a sense of unbounded entitlement to rule and control, justified by the Confucian Mandate of Heaven, the Manchu Way, Tibetan spirituality and European firepower. The great Qing emperors tried to be all things to all their people: great conquerors, preaching the superiority of their ethnic heritage; learned Confucian poets, scholars, receivers of tributaries; Buddhist messiahs. While the foundation stones of the empire – the economy and the army – were prospering, success seems to have kept this multi-ethnic balancing act in place. But once these same things sank into decline at the close of the eighteenth century, the whole edifice of empire began to shake.
I know I said that the China also uses the Opium Wars to define its history and its relationship with the West, but I think I will wait on that since this post is getting mighty long and I am sure the book will talk about that in more detail later.

I just really found it fascinating that our whole conception of Imperial China changed because of this quite justifiable trade policy by the QIng. Suddenly, they were backwards, archaic and static instead of fascinating, sophisticated, etc (which is what we thought of China in the Enlightenment), and that negative view just kinda snowballed due to the Opium War, China's serious troubles in the 19th century, and its military weakness. And I think that conception of China, at least its Imperial history (or at the very least the Qing dynasty), has stuck with us today.

The current view of the Opium War that the Chinese government promulgates was that the Opium War was the start of China's decline, that British, in their evilness, conspired to make China weak, steal its wealth, turn it into a semi-colonial and semi-feudal state. These evil imperialists, later joined by Russians, Germans, French, Japanese, and Americans, kept China down until the Glorious Communists rescued China from that Imperial yoke and created a new society and prosperous state and society that will see China take its rightful place on the world stage. As you can guess, this viewpoint heavily stresses humiliation and a desire for revenge to stoke nationalist fever for the glory of the Chinese state.

This is not a new viewpoint of the War, and in fact, was first declared by the Nationalists when Sun Yatsen finally agreed to get support of the Soviets. In return, he had to expose some Communist ideology, anti-imperialism being a major factor. The Communists obviously continued this sort of historical thinking and propaganda. Before this, the Opium War was not even actually known by that name, and instead of humiliation and revenge, the war evoked feelings of shame. Shame of China's weakness and backwardness compared to the West. During and right after the war, the Opium War wasn't even considered a war. It was thought of as a minor border skirmish or raid, similar to those raids by those nomadic horse archers on the western borders.

What is very interesting is what happened in the 80s and 90s. Obviously, the 80s were a decade of rapid change due to China adopting capitalism, rejecting mass campaigns, and basically reversing every Maoist policy. This created an ideological and propaganda problem. If the Chinese government was so badly wrong, as can be seen in the dramatic government policy shift (which was obviously felt by the people), the natural question is why the hell do we need the party? Why not democracy or another form of government? This can be seen in the increasing discontent with the party, protests against the government, the best known being the ones at Tiananmen.

Well, up until that point, ideology and propaganda was basically ignored since they were just so focused on changing China economically (and were probably just sick of propaganda). Tiananmen convinced them that they needed to create a new ideology, new propaganda, and a new reason why the Party should be ruling China. They came up with Nationalism and using history to serve that purpose. For example:

The campaign encompassed three big ideas: first, to indoctrinate the Chinese in the idea that China possessed a unique, glorious, millennia-old ‘national condition’ (guoqing) unready for democracy; second, to remind them of their sufferings at the hands of the West; and third, to underline the genius of Communist leadership. In practice, this meant talking up the ‘great achievements’ of the Chinese People, Nation and Communist Party, in stirring films, in feel-good sing-songs, in top-hundred lists of heroes, great events and battles and in numbing references to China’s ‘century of humiliation’ inflicted by foreign imperialism, always beginning with the Opium Wars, always passing slickly over the CCP’s own acts of violence (the Maoist famine of the early 1960s; the Cultural Revolution; the 1989 crackdown). ‘How can we give our youth patriotic education?’ asked Seeking Truth (Qiushi), the party’s leading policy journal. ‘By teaching them to understand the historical inevitability and correctness of choosing the socialist road . . . since the Opium War.’
What is amazing is that Chinese textbooks didn't even teach about the Opium War until 1990, so this is clearly a concentrated effort by the party to foster a certain historical narrative for their own political purposes.

Was it successful? Well...

Chen Xitong – Mayor of Beijing through the spring and summer of 1989 – termed Patriotic Education a ‘systematically engineered project’; and it seems to have produced results. A survey of 10,000 young people in 1995 already found most of them expecting China’s status to surge over the next thirty years; that year, patriotism rose to number two in the list of values important to China’s youth, from number five only ten years previously.28 In 2003, almost half of a 5,000-strong sample of students surveyed expressed confidence that in twenty years China should and would be able to become a leading military world power.29 Popular, anti-Western nationalism has regularly erupted since the mid-1990s.
So, that clearly indicates a rise in Nationalism since the Historical Nationalism campaign. However, the situation is a bit more complicated than that. For example, the author states that many of the youth going through these history class find it incredibly boring, that the teachers complain about them not being patriotic and only caring about their future and finding Ancient Chinese history far more interesting.

Of course, it has produced a notoriously super nationalistic community on the internet, but even in that situation it is a bit interesting. The author notes that these people are quick to criticize the Chinese government for not standing up for CHina enough and backing down to the Imperialist dogs too often. Moreover, even though they claim to be super Nationalistic, the author notes that they are usually quite comfortable in participating in the global economy and culture and even going to Britain and other places to study.

Well, then, what is the problem with China's construction of its own past? I think the author makes a very good point that it isnt so much as historical errors that are the problem, but emphasizing some parts and de-emphasizing or not even mentioning others create a false-narrative.

Well, let us deconstruct China's version of the Opium War.Was it the start of China's humiliation and Decline?

No, China had massive massive problems before the Opium War. The major being that China found itself in a Malthusian Trap. They did not have enough agricultural land to support their population and they did not have the technology to increase yields on the agricultural fields that already existed. For a pre-industrial economy this is absolutely devastating because the entire economy is dependent on agriculture. A shortage of land means peasants are living in poverty and that many don't even have land. It also hurts the economy of the cities, merchants and craftsman because there is less wealth, less population to fuel those industries.

What this results in is peasant rebellions, and, starting in the late 18th century, there began were frequent and massive peasant rebellions that caused just an insane amount of death and destruction.

Did the Opium Trade cause China to lose all of its silver?

Well, why is Silver such a big deal for China? THis explains it quite well:

[Vivek KuRa · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked up this book to learn more about the Opium war and its background. The first couple of chapters gave me the background, general outline of the war, key players, time line and general circumstances in 1839.But in the following chapters, to my surprise I started sensing some heavy imperial apologetic tone by the author. I was also appalled to see the narrative radically shifting into victim blaming the Chinese for this war.

The author argues that British capitalists cannot be held accountable for the already existing drug problem among the Chinese. But the truth is, even though China has been historically using opium since 8th century, it was only used by the royals and aristocrats mostly. The commoners used them sparingly for medicinal purposes. But it was the East India company that flooded the Chinese market with cheap opium grown and processed from India for peanuts in exchange for the much sought after chinoiserie, tea, silk and spices back in England.

Also, this was a lucrative affair beyond imagination. It made hefty profits which funded the British empire in India and Royal navy significantly. But the opioid deluge created 120 million opium addicts in China in 1830s. When the addiction problem sky rocketed, the Chinese government starting push back on the opium trade in 1839 This irked the empire and the EIC narco-capitalists. So they went to war against the technologically inferior Qing dynasty army and Navy primarily to protect their investment and profits as always. It was the British casus belli to assert imperial might in the interest of capitalism. This three year war at its end claimed 20,000 Chinese causalities but secured Hong Kong and opening of several ports for supposedly free trade through the Treaty of Nanking.

I abandoned this book after chapter 3 as I felt the author was on a mission to some how vindicate or soften the culpability of the British Imperialism in this unjust war and carnage through this book.

[Jarvo · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1839 Britain went to war to force China to continue importing the opium it was growing in India. Not that many people in the UK seem to be aware of this, everybody in China is and this is in itself something of a problem. This is a good book, which offers an excellent account of the first opium war (we repeated the trick a bit later) and then a more muddled discussion of the war's long and troubled legacy. The war was other relatively quickly , and was very one sided. The British were more technologically advanced and focussed, the Chinese were hopelessly muddled and distracted by other issues. Subsequently the war has been passed as something not that important or of immense significance, and in China the focus has switched between the internal weakness that allowed such a national disgrace and the perfidy of the foreign devils who committed such an outrage. But this seems to me how historical interpretation tends to work, even if the manipulation of it by recent Chinese governments is a bit blatant. The author is at pains to point out that the war was not part of some big conspiracy to divide and rule China, it was all about money. So we were not evil, just greedy. That is still quite a long time on the naughty step, at least in my opinion.

[Anthony Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're interested in why there is such deep sensitivity over the ownership and sovereignty of Hong Kong many of the answers are here. I was living in HK when I read this book and it gave me deep cultural context for why the city is so important to China and why it was the source of a profound historical wound. That the British went to war (multiple times) to protect the right to sell to and keep the Chinese addicted to opium is one of the more bizarre moments in military history. I know that's an over simplification of the causes of the wars but it's still the main message I took from Lovell's book.

[rochelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great for the causes, event and consequences leading up to CCP in the 21st century. Lovell is cited by many other sources I utilised for my research project on the consequences of opening up China to Western Powers (Century of Humiliation and its effect on Chinese nationalist sentiment). Relevant also to my unique topic on translation issues and its role in precipitating the conflict between Britain and Qing Dynasty China.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Explains a lot about how and why China is acting in the way it is now. Not much glory in English imperialism and Christian missionaries. But demonstrates that China is not as homogeneous as we tend to believe. Entertaining and revealing historical treatise.

[Louise Bray · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating read. I really appreciated the way the author not only explained the events surrounding the Opium Wars in meticulous detail, but also the effect it still has on modern China. It explained a lot.