Title: Third rate nonsense.
Product review: It's hard to say what is worse, Stella Dong's third rate prose or her weak grasp of Chinese history. Her explanation of the causes of the Opium war are nothing more than a condemnation of the West for exporting opium to China. Unfortunately she makes no mention of the fact that opium was also legal in Britain at the time, was legal in China at the time for medicinal purposes, and was actively traded and consumed by Chinese since roughly the 7th century AD. Not to mention the myriad non-opium related factors leading to the war such as anti-foreign riots and an insistence on foreign envoys prostrating themselves on the ground in front of the emperor. You should look into books by Jonathan Spence (who incidentally has an excellent writing style and is a Professor of History at Yale, unlike Dong, who is barely literate and posesses no noteworthy education) which also highlight the decadence of Chinese cities but on a much more sophisticated level.
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