Opium Wars


It had a cast lifted from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera and a plot that would shame a penny dreadful. It is a quintessentially Victorian story, featuring a shadowy, manipulative and evil Chinese mandarin, incompetent natives, an aristocrat dispensing magnanimous British justice and his frail, delicate English wife. And all set against the explosive and exotic backdrop of the Opium Wars and the booming new Crown […]

Lord Bowring and the Great Bakery Incident