Imperial Twilight: The Opium Conflict and the Finish of China’s Final Golden Age

As China reclaims its place as a world energy,
Imperial Twilight appears again to inform the story of the nation’s final age of ascendance and the way it got here to an finish within the nineteenth-century Opium Conflict.

 

As one of the potent turning factors within the nation’s trendy historical past, the Opium Conflict has since come to face for every little thing that at this time’s China seeks to place behind it. On this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new mild on the early makes an attempt by Western merchants and missionaries to “open” China at the same time as China’s imperial rulers have been struggling to handle their nation’s decline and Confucian students grappled with the best way to use international commerce to China’s benefit. The guide paints an everlasting portrait of an immensely worthwhile—and largely peaceable—assembly of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the shockingly unjust wars within the annals of imperial historical past. Brimming with an enchanting forged of British, Chinese language, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has essential implications for at this time’s unsure and ever-changing political local weather.