This book, "Opium War", by Julia Lovell, is brilliant. However, "Opium Inc." is another good companion book.

The book focuses on The First Opium War. Julia Lovell starts with a background of the Qing Empire and the steady degradation of the king. Conditions in China were unstable. The traders were making money off opium, and the courtiers routinely gave false information to the king. Conversely, you had a ravenous British Crown looking for revenue. Opium.

She covers huge ground in the book, revealing Chinese weakness, British duplicity and warmongering, and the debates that raged in England around opium.

Then, she skipped past the next wars and wrote about the fall of the Qing Empire and the rise of Chinese Nationalism and its memory of the wars.

The Chinese have long memories, and, as she says, the memories of the Century of Humiliation live on in China.

An excellent book, one for the keeping. ( )

Accessible, and takes time to mention the issues behind the war. Fascinating in a horrible way really to think the British empire went to war to sell what we know of today as raw heroin and yet still manage to moralize while invading.

Particularly enjoyed a few comments on the rise of the prohibition lobby (who in many ways are still with us today, albeit in a different form) and the types of characters that championed it. I think this type of background information may well of taken up some of the space that could of been used for detail on the second opium war, but personally I think it's a sacrifice that was overall worth while to see things in some kind of context. ( )

excellent book about the opium war, it has complete maps and exciting story-telling. It is well-written and very informative. ( )