The sinologist describes how the Opium War shaped the country and its relationship with the West
In person, Julia Lovell defies the stereotype. For one, she’s far younger than I expected, an impression enhanced by her outfit of red floral skirt, white top and a silver pendant on a chain. For another, her historical research is rooted firmly in the present, as the title of her latest book, Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China suggests.
Like many Indians with an amateur’s interest in history, the Opium War for me vaguely registered as a sideshow of the colonial past, one of many measures of mercantilist exploitation together with slaves, indentured labour, cotton, indigo, sugar and so on. Names like Jardine Matheson had a local resonance as pillars of British corporate Establishment. And bar some glancing references in undergraduate history, most of my knowledge was gleaned from Herge’s 1930s classic Tintin and the Blue Lotus and, more recently, Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis series.
But Lovell’s study of this history has a contemporary resonance. The burden of her book is to demonstrate that the Opium War is, as she explains during the meal, “terribly important to the shaping of modern China and its perception of the West”.
Since Lovell did not have any preferences I chose Travertino, The Oberoi’s Italian restaurant, confident that its sparse lunchtime crowd would allow us a quiet meal (it did not disappoint; only one other table was occupied). She’s on the usual book-launch interview-a-thon, so we break off our chat about the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal that is roiling Britain and order quickly — mushroom risotto for her and red snapper for me, both meals washed down with orange juice.
More From This Section
I was curious: the opium trade was certainly an egregious example of British mercantilist venality, but it did not match the kind of brutality after the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. So I could understand modern China’s obsession with the latter but not the former. Lovell explains that the Opium War was “the emblematic first clash between China and the West so it is the beginning of something much, much bigger”.
Of course, she adds, “China is also very preoccupied with remembering the brutal Japanese invasion of the Second World War. At the same time, it remembers the ‘century of humiliation’, which is shorthand for referring to China’s terrible 100-year experience between the Opium War in 1840 and the Japanese invasion. So the Opium War is the tragic curtain raiser, if you like, on China’s modern history.”
Her interest in this aspect of the subject was stoked during her first trip to mainland China in September 1997, a couple of months after the handover of Hong Kong, the British boom-town that prospered from the opium trade. As part of the celebrations, she watched a Chinese film that had been commissioned on the Opium War. “It was a long, dark film that introduces the Opium War as a terrible humiliation for China, a humiliation that was only expunged with the handover of Hong Kong”.
That was her first experience of how China encountered its modern history and a dramatic contrast to the way her own country viewed the same event. In Britain, she says, although most people are embarrassed by the country’s imperial past, the Opium War doesn’t loom large (it doesn’t even figure in Britain’s school history syllabus although India and Africa do). “So one of the things I wanted to achieve was to remind readers in Britain that we have this shameful past in China that still colours China’s attitudes to and relationship with the West today,” she says.
Our orders arrive in record time and I discover that the downside of eating in a near-empty restaurant is the assiduous attention we attract. No less than three people ask us if we like the food. We do, it’s great, but the interruptions make us lose the thread of the conversation.
Although Lovell says she has had the benefit of many scholarly works published in the West and mainland China, she did a considerable amount of primary research for the book — “speaking to as many Chinese people as I could”. One of her findings was the difference between the official outlook and that of many ordinary Chinese. Textbooks, museums and films portrayed the Opium War in a standard way as the start of China’s heroic struggle with the West. But at a high school in Beijing where she sat in on a lesson for perspective on how the subject was taught, the students’ responses were dominated by criticism: of China’s disorganisation, its people’s weakness in letting themselves become addicted and so on. And later in the meal she tells me how a lady in her forties in Hong Kong thought the Opium War was the best thing that happened to China in the past 200 years!
Today, China’s rise to global pre-eminence has encouraged many universities to offer language and history courses. But surely studying Chinese when she attended university was unusual? For Lovell, it was less of a considered, commercial decision than an extension of a family interest in language and books. Her parents are school teachers (music and the classics), her brother a historian of Russia and her sister a musician. As a teenager Lovell studied French, Spanish and German. But Cambridge (she attended Emmanuel College) offered a rare opportunity to study Chinese.
It was challenging, she recalls, mainly because although there is a scheme behind it, the Chinese language has no alphabet. I tell her how on a brief visit to China I found that the Chinese are extremely proud of their language. In fact, she points out, “pride in China’s linguistic and literary heritage is a mainstay of China’s nationalist pride” and that took her to the subject of her first book. Called The Politics of Cultural Capital it was about China’s preoccupation with a Chinese writer winning the Nobel prize for literature.
Like entering the WTO, she explains, winning the Nobel was seen as a very important source of international face and prestige. “In the 1980s you saw conferences being held to help Chinese writers win the Nobel prize, official delegations were sent to Sweden to raise awareness and a real industry in articles discussing why China had never won a Nobel and what it needed to do to win one.”
Who were they advocating? It depended on who you asked, but every constituency in China has a different candidate that they wanted to put forward, she says.
And instead, I joke, a Chinese, Liu Xiaobo, wins the Peace prize, which they so didn’t want! As it turned out, the literature prize was won by an ethnic Chinese, Gao Xingjian, who left China in 1988 saying no creative writer could stay there and create the work they want. Gao became a French citizen. His works are not available in China and he is basically persona non grata there. “So there was some discomfort over Gao but not as intense as it was over Liu,” she says.
Lovell says she is keen to learn Indian languages because she plans to write her next book on the spread of global Maoism. It will start, she says, with the “western love affair with Maoism, where it developed into a kind of radical chic in the 1960s”. Students bought Mao suits and the Little Red Book (her own copy is inherited from her father who owned one although he wasn’t politically involved). Then she’ll take in Peru (the infamous “Shining Path” guerilla movement), Nepal and, of course, India, the “most interesting case study of all because it is seen such a significant domestic policy issue”.
Her liaison comes in to remind her about the next meeting, so I quickly ask whether she’s ever smoked opium, seeing as she’s an expert on the subject. Oh no, she replies slightly shocked, then sensing the facetiousness of the question, adds, “No opium was consumed in the writing of this book.”