"Jack Beeching's enlightening account of a notorious epoch in nineteenth-century imperialism sets the background for China's view of the West today. In the 1820s British merchants were under pressure to expand trade with China to pay for its tea and silk. The only readily available commodity the British had to offer was high-grade Bengalese opium, distributed through the East India company. By guile, bribery, and violence, the drug habit was so successfully implanted in China that by the middle of the century opium was the largest single cash commodity in the world. The Chinese government's efforts to stamp out the destructive, though highly profitable, trade erupted in a series of minor wars with the West between 1830 and 1860, climaxed by the looting and burning of the Summer Palace. Known as the Opium wars and hardly remembered by the victors, they are still vivid in the minds of China's present-day leaders" -- from page 4 of cover.