Imperial Twilight
The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age
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4.5 • 19 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War.
As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Platt (Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom), a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, provides a fresh perspective on the first Opium War, the conflict that allowed Western merchants to pry open China's riches and gain unprecedented trading privileges. Far from an inevitable conflict, Platt posits the Opium War (1839 1842) was the unexpected and bloody culmination of a long period of peaceful relations between British traders and China under the Qing emperors. Moreover, it marked a decisive shift in British attitudes toward China; from being viewed as a mighty empire and civilizational equal, China was now a subordinate Eastern nation, just another feather in the Royal Navy's cap. Platt provides a highly textured account of the decades leading up to the Opium War, detailing the gradual penetration of the China trade by a series of British adventurers whose antics were more buffoonish than brilliant (when George Macartney first arrived at the Chinese court he donned an outlandish velvet suit and feathered cap in a misguided attempt to impress the emperor) and whose efforts only succeeded because of the severe pressure placed on the Qing empire by peasant uprisings. The narrative is slow-moving and only comes to life in the last chapter, when the breakout of the Opium War provides some much-needed action. That said, Platt's research is impeccably presented in this winning history of British and Chinese trade.
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