John Keay
Poppy Power
Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age
By Stephen R Platt
Atlantic Books 529pp £25 order from our bookshop
In the belief that a language impenetrable to European adults might be acquired spontaneously by someone of tender years, in 1736 a small boy was landed at the foreign trading concession now called Shamian Island on the riverfront at Canton (now Guangzhou) in southeast China. The boy’s name was James Flint and he would not disappoint. His hair was black, and when it grew long enough to be braided into a pigtail, young Flint even looked Chinese. He mixed with the settlement’s servants and put his English at the service of Canton’s traders. They called him Flink, which sounded more Chinese than Flint. Long before the streetwise Kim of Kipling’s fiction had the run of Lahore, Canton had its waterfront equivalent.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties