Book Excerpt for the Day

    By 1800, the British thought they had found a perfect solution to their tea-trade deficit, the ideal product to give China something to do with all its British silver: Indian opium.  The Chinese government thought otherwise, banning opium in 1829 and, when drug-smuggling increased, dispatching a commissioner, Lin Zexu, to Canton to stop the illegal trade.  After neither Chinese nor British merchants took any notice of his order to destroy opium stocks, he took action himself and flushed a year’s supply of opium into the sea.  The British retaliated by shelling Canton; war was declared.

    (from The Great Wall by Julia Lovell)

    8*/10.  The complete review is here.

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