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Letting off Steampunk

Anna Chen

It's not often we hear about the opium wars in Britain - this shameful period has largely been omitted from the school history syllabus. So, when the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich asked me to present an evening of entertainment, the topic more or less stood to attention and said: 'Hi, I'm Poppy, and I'm yours for the night.'

That was a year ago, when the museum was preparing to open the Traders gallery, focusing on the East India Company, which had a monopoly over British trade with the East from 1600. The gallery's exhibition shows how the company and the narco-capitalists who came after it were backed by the military might of the British state in forcing cheap mass-produced Indian opium on China, turning an aristocratic vice into a national addiction.

It's hard to deal with so rapacious a union of trade and state from a neutral position without mentioning practices that would make Mexican drug cartels blush. However, with some quarters of the establishment insisting on sanitising the conflicts by dubbing them the 'Anglo-Chinese wars', historian Niall Ferguson unable to bring himself to name Lin Zexu - whose destruction of British opium stocks led to the first war - and Julia Lovell writing in her book The Opium War that Britain was not creating a market but merely satisfying one, I thought the other side of the story should be told in the interests of enlightenment values such as truth.

And so I wrote The Steampunk Opium Wars.

On February 16, as fascinating a collection of cultural warriors stepped onto the stage at the Greenwich museum to tell the story in verse and music in a world of steampunk Victoriana, goggles, top hats and leather. Journalist and author Charles Shaar Murray accompanied us on grinding electric guitar; John Constable and Neil Hornick, both veterans of the counterculture, were magnificent as Lord Palmerston and Captain Ironside, respectively. Paul Anderson, former editor of Tribune magazine, played a sinister Sir Jardine-Matheson and ace blogger Louise Whittle played a laudanum-tippling Queen Victoria. Hugo Trebels, of Chinese origin himself, sang a rollicking Lin Zexu Just Says No! And pop star Deborah Evans-Stickland stepped out as Britannia in a replica Roman helmet to sum up what it was all about with her version of the Flying Lizards hit Money (That's What I Want).

In a supreme accolade, the overwhelming response from the audience was a resounding 'I never knew that'. So one-nil for the enlightenment.

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