the war on drugs War,on,drugs

　　How people remember the past can often be more important than what actually happened. From America’s celebration of the“first Thanksgiving” to China’s lambasting of the “oppressive landlord” during the Communist revolution, societies often manipulate their messy and conflicting experiences into a clean, readily-understood story.

　　It is therefore fitting that historian Julia Lovell devoted her new book, “The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China,” to chronicling both the 19th century conflict and how it is remembered. Lovell breezily narrates how a handful of forces from the farflung British Isles brought the Celestial Empire to its knees, and how the war’s legacy was later used and abused by Nationalists, ……此处隐藏505个字…… en by events, and despite his initial opposition to opium he was remembered in the media as a sell-out to British interests. By contrast, his replacement Henry Pottinger was a dyed-in-the-wool military grunt who saw every diplomatic problem as a nail to be hammered with a few gunboats.

　　Their Chinese counterpart in Canton, Lin Zexu, climbed the greasy Qing pole by diligently acing every Confucian exam that came his way. At heart, he was a “careful bureaucrat with a passion for freight management.” Charged with ridding the empire of pesky “sea barbarians” before he could move on to his dream job in Jiangsu province, Lin did what he did best: played strictly by the Qing book, to disastrous results.