The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Picador Collection)

by Julia Lovell

Drugs have a universal talent for dismaying the authorities: not only do they consume otherwise usefully productive money and time but, more crucially, they loosen inner psychological constraints, and the sense of restraint that holds convention together.

On the last day of 1838, the emperor decided to appoint Lin Imperial Commissioner to Canton. After a century of fits and starts, the Qing war on opium was about to begin in earnest.

in early nineteenth-century Canton, teaching a foreigner Chinese remained a capital offence.