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

by Julia Lovell

always been in the past, to repress the traffic – never the desire to gain revenue from such a source.’47 Nonetheless, during the 1870s south-west China alone began to produce more opium than the country was importing. Anti-imperialist passions in late-Qing China were often directed at issues other than opium. Through the 1900s, many regions of China were in the grip of a passionate Rights Recovery Movement, opposing European and American attempts to buy up the country’s nascent railway system and Qing willingness to sell it: students threatened to starve themselves to death, soldiers wrote letters of protest in blood and one academic allegedly died of sadness on hearing the news that the government had accepted a massive foreign loan to build one stretch of track.48 A cartoon from the 1908 Shanghai Times entitled ‘Experts at Destroying China’ pictured five pickaxes hacking at the characters for ‘China’. Only one represented foreign interests (missionaries); the other four stood for soldiers, officials, political factions and bandits.49 From the 1920s onwards, China’s young, authoritarian political parties would make much of the horrors of imperialism in China; the reality was more equivocal.50 Certainly, there was much that was alarmingly foreign, or racist about the Western presence in China (concentrated in the concessions that developed in the treaty ports after 1842). Falling into the first category was the curious and disgusting food that the foreigners seemed to enj...