Imperial Twilight

Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age by Stephen R Platt, 452 pages

As late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, China was regarded as one of the world's great powers.  Europeans marveled at the sophisticated administration that governed a nation far larger than any in the West, supported by a culture of incredible subtlety and antiquity.  By imperial decree, contact was limited to designated areas of Canton and Macao on China's southeastern coast, far from the capital, and foreigners were forbidden from learning the Chinese language.  From the Chinese perspective, whatever goods they had to offer, Westerners ultimately came to the Middle Kingdom as supplicants pleading for a share in her riches and refinement.  A few decades later all of this had changed.  Europeans now considered China to be a backwards nation mired in superstition, ripe for exploitation and in desperate need of Enlightenment.  Increasingly, the Chinese elite themselves would insist on the necessity of a modernization which was synonymous with Westernization.  The turning point was the Opium War, when the Chinese Empire was humiliated by the might of the Royal Navy - as Tolstoy put it, Progress had been brought to China "by means of powder and cannon-balls."  

Yet, as Stephen Platt relates, none of this was inevitable.  The opium trade was deeply unpopular in England, and the government barely survived a vote attempting to forestall the war.  The Chinese, for their part, understood that the opium trade was ultimately driven by internal demand rather than external supply.  Relations between the nations had weathered other crises in the past, with each government placing the responsibility on their own representatives to avoid conflicts which might endanger existing arrangements.  The Opium War, then, was the result of a breakdown of the status quo rather than its logical culmination.  In telling this crucial but oft-misunderstood story, Platt deftly manages to balance detail and narrative drive, with a particular focus on the intriguing personalities that populated the intersection where East met West.