Review | The first opium war: the corruption, mistakes and misfortunes at the root of Sino-British conflict

Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age
by Stephen R. Platt
Knopf

Many important historical events seem inevitable in retrospect. When placed in a narrative, there is the sense of them being moved – or at least precipitated – by greater forces.

Other episodes are blundered into and the conse­quences take on their own logic. The first opium war (1839-42) between Britain and China, suggests historian Stephen R. Platt, is one such instance.

Subsequent events – the “century of humiliation”, the rise of Hong Kong, the Boxer rebellion and the founding of the People’s Republic – cast dark shadows over the opium war, but only in retrospect, as a harbinger of China’s open­ing to foreign trade and its inability to resist incursions on its sovereignty and territory.

Platt’s new book aims to dispel the myths surrounding the conflict, presenting its events as the result of doubt, misapprehension and mistakes made by the central figures involved.

The conflict itself was so limited that the epithet “opium war” was hardly deserved. The main battle, in Dinghai, on the island of Chusan (now known as Zhoushan), in Zhejiang province, was over in just 10 minutes. Chinese guns, one of the best of which “bore an inscription showing it had been cast in the year 1601”, were no match for modern British ships and weaponry. The aggressor’s “sixteen men-of-war (the three largest carrying seventy-four guns each), four steamers, and four thousand British and Indian troops on seven transport steamers” met no serious military resistance in a country whose population numbered 300 million people (one-third of the world’s population at the time) but was beset by internal conflict and economic strife.

Imperial Twilight is a fast-paced narrative of trade, exploration, diplomatic disputes and early cultural inter­action. The story of British efforts to enter China is fascinating and richly described.

First came Lord Macartney, sent to China in 1792 on Britain’s earliest diplomatic and trade mission, and received with famous disdain by Emperor Qianlong, who announced: “The products of our empire are abun­dant, and there is nothing we do not have.”