Be careful what you wish for
A time when the West clamoured for free trade with China
The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of China. By Julia Lovell. Picador; 480 pages; £25. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
HISTORY, it turns out, is not just written by the winners. In documenting the historical crapshoot of the last 200 years, there have been few losers more assiduous than the Chinese. So, apart from adapting first Karl Marx and now Adam Smith, what have they been writing? Rather a lot, it seems. A topic of choice is the Opium Wars, those 19th-century skirmishes on the far-eastern fringe of the British empire. They are largely unknown by British schoolchildren, but successive Chinese governments have made sure the same cannot be said for their overachieving students in the Middle Kingdom.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Be careful what you wish for"
From the October 29th 2011 edition
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