Download or read book The Social Life of Opium in China written by Yangwen Zheng and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-09-08 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description

Download or read book The Social Life of Opium in China written by Yangwen Zheng and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Social Life of Opium in Qing China written by Yang-Wen Zheng and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Social Life of the Chinese written by Doolittle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor and Francis, an informa company.

Download or read book The Fall of the God of Money written by Keith McMahon and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2002 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first truly cross-cultural study of opium, Keith McMahon considers the perspectives of both smokers and non-smokers from China and the Euro-West and from both sides of the issue of opium prohibition. The author stages a dramatic confrontation between the Chinese opium user and the Euro-Westerner who saw in opium the image of an uncanny Asiatic menace. The rise of the opium demon meant the fall of the god of money, that is, Chinese money, and the irreversible trend in which Confucianism gave way to Christianity. The book explores early Western observations of opium smoking, the formation of arguments for and against the legalization of opium, the portrayals of opium smoking in Chinese poetry and prose, and scenes of opium-smoking interactions among male and female smokers and smokers of all social levels in 19th-century China. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Download or read book China s War on Smuggling written by Philip Thai and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smuggling along the Chinese coast has been a thorn in the side of many regimes. From opium and weapons concealed aboard foreign steamships in the Qing dynasty to nylon stockings and wristwatches trafficked in the People’s Republic, contests between state and smuggler have exerted a surprising but crucial influence on the political economy of modern China. Seeking to consolidate domestic authority and confront foreign challenges, states introduced tighter regulations, higher taxes, and harsher enforcement. These interventions sparked widespread defiance, triggering further coercive measures. Smuggling simultaneously threatened the state’s power while inviting repression that strengthened its authority. Philip Thai chronicles the vicissitudes of smuggling in modern China—its practice, suppression, and significance—to demonstrate the intimate link between illicit coastal trade and the amplification of state power. China’s War on Smuggling shows that the fight against smuggling was not a simple law enforcement problem but rather an impetus to centralize authority and expand economic controls. The smuggling epidemic gave Chinese states pretext to define legal and illegal behavior, and the resulting constraints on consumption and movement remade everyday life for individuals, merchants, and communities. Drawing from varied sources such as legal cases, customs records, and popular press reports and including diverse perspectives from political leaders, frontline enforcers, organized traffickers, and petty runners, Thai uncovers how different regimes policed maritime trade and the unintended consequences their campaigns unleashed. China’s War on Smuggling traces how defiance and repression redefined state power, offering new insights into modern Chinese social, legal, and economic history.

Download or read book Imperial Twilight written by Stephen R. Platt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.

Download or read book The Lion and the Dragon written by Mark Simner and published by Fonthill Media. This book was released on 2019-06-29 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the middle of the 19th-Century, Britain and China would twice go to war over trade, and in particular the trade in opium. The Chinese people had progressively become addicted to the narcotic, a habit that British merchants were more than happy to feed from their opium-poppy fields in India. When the Qing dynasty rulers of China attempted to suppress this trade--due to the serious social and economic problems it caused--the British Government responded with gunboat diplomacy, and conflict soon ensued. The first conflict, known as the First Anglo-Chinese War or Opium War (1839-42), ended in British victory and the Treaty of Nanking. However, this treaty was heavily biased in favour of the British, and it would not be long before there was a renewal of hostilities, taking the form of what became known as the Second Anglo-Chinese War or Arrow War (1857-60). Again, the second conflict would end with an 'unequal treaty' that was heavily biased towards the victor. The Lion and the Dragon: Britain's Opium Wars with China, 1839-1860 examines the causes and ensuing military history of these tragic conflicts, as well as their bitter legacies.

Download or read book Opium Empire and the Global Political Economy written by Carl Trocki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drug epidemics are clearly not just a peculiar feature of modern life; the opium trade in the nineteenth century tells us a great deal about Asian herion traffic today. In an age when we are increasingly aware of large scale drug use, this book takes a long look at the history of our relationship with mind-altering substances. Engagingly written, with lay readers as much as specialists in mind, this book will be fascinating reading for historians, social scientists, as well as those involved in Asian studies, or economic history.

Download or read book Bullets and Opium written by Liao Yiwu and published by Atria/One Signal Publishers. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “memorable series of portraits of the working class people who defended Tiananmen Square” (The New York Review of Books) during the protests from the award-winning poet, dissident, and “one of the most original and remarkable Chinese writers of our time” (Philip Gourevitch). Much has been written about the Tiananmen Square protests, but very little exists in the words of those who were actually there. For over seven years, Liao Yiwu—a master of contemporary Chinese literature, imprisoned and persecuted as a counter-revolutionary until he fled the country in 2011—secretly interviewed survivors of the devastating 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Tortured, imprisoned, and forced into silence and the margins of Chinese society for thirty years, their harrowing and unforgettable stories are now finally revealed in this “indispensable historical document” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Download or read book Narcotic Culture written by Frank Dikötter and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2004-04-16 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To this day, the perception persists that China was a civilization defeated by imperialist Britain's most desirable trade commodity, opium—a drug that turned the Chinese into cadaverous addicts in the iron grip of dependence. Britain, in an effort to reverse the damage caused by opium addiction, launched its own version of the "war on drugs," which lasted roughly sixty years, from 1880 to World War II and the beginning of Chinese communism. But, as Narcotic Culture brilliantly shows, the real scandal in Chinese history was not the expansion of the drug trade by Britain in the early nineteenth century, but rather the failure of the British to grasp the consequences of prohibition. In a stunning historical reversal, Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun tell this different story of the relationship between opium and the Chinese. They reveal that opium actually had few harmful effects on either health or longevity; in fact, it was prepared and appreciated in highly complex rituals with inbuilt constraints preventing excessive use. Opium was even used as a medicinal panacea in China before the availability of aspirin and penicillin. But as a result of the British effort to eradicate opium, the Chinese turned from the relatively benign use of that drug to heroin, morphine, cocaine, and countless other psychoactive substances. Narcotic Culture provides abundant evidence that the transition from a tolerated opium culture to a system of prohibition produced a "cure" that was far worse than the disease. Delving into a history of drugs and their abuses, Narcotic Culture is part revisionist history of imperial and twentieth-century Britain and part sobering portrait of the dangers of prohibition.

Download or read book Opium Regimes written by Timothy Brook and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000-09-18 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opium Regimes draws on a range of research to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation, but involved Chinese merchants and state agents, and Japanese imperial agents as well.

Download or read book Narcotic Culture written by Frank Dikötter and published by C. HURST & CO. PUBLISHERS. This book was released on 2004 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China was turned into a nation of opium addicts by the pernicious forces of imperialist trade. This study systematically questions this assertion on the basis of abundant archives from China, Europe and the US, showing that opium had few harmful effects on either health or longevity.

Download or read book Opium in China extracted from China political commercial and social written by Robert Montgomery Martin and published by . This book was released on 1847 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book China and the Chinese written by Henry Charles Sirr and published by . This book was released on 1849 with total page 890 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Opium Fiend written by Steven Martin and published by Villard. This book was released on 2012-06-26 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A renowned authority on the secret world of opium recounts his descent into ruinous obsession with one of the world’s oldest and most seductive drugs, in this harrowing memoir of addiction and recovery. A natural-born collector with a nose for exotic adventure, San Diego–born Steven Martin followed his bliss to Southeast Asia, where he found work as a freelance journalist. While researching an article about the vanishing culture of opium smoking, he was inspired to begin collecting rare nineteenth-century opium-smoking equipment. Over time, he amassed a valuable assortment of exquisite pipes, antique lamps, and other opium-related accessories—and began putting it all to use by smoking an extremely potent form of the drug called chandu. But what started out as recreational use grew into a thirty-pipe-a-day habit that consumed Martin’s every waking hour, left him incapable of work, and exacted a frightful physical and financial toll. In passages that will send a chill up the spine of anyone who has ever lived in the shadow of substance abuse, Martin chronicles his efforts to control and then conquer his addiction—from quitting cold turkey to taking “the cure” at a Buddhist monastery in the Thai countryside. At once a powerful personal story and a fascinating historical survey, Opium Fiend brims with anecdotes and lore surrounding the drug that some have called the methamphetamine of the nineteenth-century. It recalls the heyday of opium smoking in the United States and Europe and takes us inside the befogged opium dens of China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. The drug’s beguiling effects are described in vivid detail—as are the excruciating pains of withdrawal—and there are intoxicating tales of pipes shared with an eclectic collection of opium aficionados, from Dutch dilettantes to hard-core addicts to world-weary foreign correspondents. A compelling tale of one man’s transformation from respected scholar to hapless drug slave, Opium Fiend puts us under opium’s spell alongside its protagonist, allowing contemporary readers to experience anew the insidious allure of a diabolical vice that the world has all but forgotten.

Download or read book Intoxicating Manchuria written by Norman Smith and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2012-10-03 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In China, both opium and alcohol were used for centuries in the pursuit of health and leisure while simultaneously linked to personal and social decline. The impact of these substances is undeniable, and the role they have played in Chinese social, cultural, and economic history is extremely complex. In Intoxicating Manchuria, Norman Smith reveals how warlord rule, Japanese occupation, and political conflict affected local intoxicant industries. These industries flourished throughout the early twentieth century, even as a vigorous anti-intoxicant movement raged. Through the lens of popular Chinese media depictions of alcohol and opium, Smith analyzes how intoxicants and addiction were understood in this society, the role the Japanese occupation of Manchuria played in their portrayal, and the efforts made to reduce opium and alcohol consumption. This is the first English-language book-length study to focus on alcohol use in modern China and the first dealing with intoxicant restrictions in the region.