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

by Julia Lovell

Eventually he was handed a governorship in what he termed a ‘den of villains, misery, murder & musquitoes’ (Texas)

The war party’s rhetorical strategy was simple: to repeat loudly that violence against China was honourable and inevitable until, in the popular imagination, it became so.

Not for nothing did the Cantonese have the saying, ‘Opium addiction is easy to cure; opium tax addiction far harder.’56