The end of empire has less to do with declining British military and political power than with a worldwide trend towards milder laxatives, according to ground-breaking new Week Ending research.
These new findings, destined to revolutionise the study of British colonial history in East Asia, are published exclusively today in the South China Morning Post.
Week Ending reached its startling new conclusions after applying its uniquely sophisticated techniques of political and historical analysis to the words of the Qing Dynasty Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu, shortly after his notorious torching of foreign traders' opium stocks - the gesture which lit the fires of the Opium War and ultimately led to the creation of Hong Kong.
'Is there a single article from China which has done any harm to foreign countries?' he thundered in a threatening letter to Queen Victoria, demanding an end to the opium trade.
'Take tea and rhubarb for example. The foreign countries cannot get along for a single day without them. If China cuts off these benefits with no sympathy for those who are to suffer, then what can the barbarians rely on to keep themselves alive?' Anyone doubting his word should look no further than Her late Britannic Majesty's family medicine cupboard. Like Commissioner Lin's own, and for that matter the medicine chests of Anthony and Cleopatra (yes, that is the Cleopatra of the dowry), it would have contained a quantity of dried Chinese rhubarb root. Rhubarb was valued across the Northern hemisphere as the perfect laxative and stomach remedy.
The British would probably not have perished en masse of permanent constipation if supplies of rhubarb had dried up. But there might have been some long-term effects on the empire's health - especially after the root was discovered in the 1920s to be a cure for the 'dreadful tropical scourge' of the colonies, bacillary dysentery.