I was walking from the pickup counter to my car with a medium-sized, chocolate-and-vanilla, soft-serve twist cone. A thirteen-year-old boy asked, “Is that good?” “Delicious,” was my response. “This is what I usually get.” He, proudly it seemed, said that he was from Missouri and had never had one. I asked where he was from and he repeated, “Missouri.” I said, “No. Where in Missouri?” “Jeff” came the response from him and his nine-year-old brother. My blank looked elicited from their mother, “Jefferson City.” After the briefest pause the somewhat condescending, “The state capital of Missouri.” After an inquiry, the family said they had relatives in New Jersey and had decided to meet in the Poconos, which is close to the Garden State but not to Jeff. It was not my place to question vacation choices. I went to my car and licked the satisfying twist cone driving to my Poconos home. I decided that if they did not have vanilla-and-chocolate twist cones in Missouri, that was another reason not to live there.

I did not look forward to the history book group’s selection of Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age (2018) by Stephen R. Platt. I expected a dry, confusing book, but Platt’s writing was so good that “page turner” came to mind. The book was more about the Chinese British background to the 1839-40 Opium War than about the war itself. I am not sure how much I will retain, but I learned a lot. For example, I had not known that Formosa, now Taiwan, was controlled by the Dutch in the 1660s. China succeed in driving away coastal pirates of that era who then settled in Formosa. After China built up its naval forces, it defeated the pirate armada, and Taiwan was incorporated into the Chinese empire.

Opium was originally an upper-class indulgence in China. Only a small fraction of the country used the drug, and few were debilitated by it. Most of the drug was imported from British India where the opium poppy grew well. The demand for opium increased when it was learned that it could be mixed with tobacco and smoked and not just eaten. The practice started in Java. The Dutch brought opium smoking to Taiwan. From there it spread to mainland China. Smoking, however, used more opium than eating it, and British profits soared.

Not surprisingly, the Brits were incensed when the Chinese official Lin Zexu sought to suppress opium use in the nineteenth century by confiscating the British opium. (Lin Zexu is a hero in Chinese textbooks. His birthday is celebrated in Taiwan, and a statue of him stands in New York City’s Chinatown with the inscription “PIONEER IN THE WAR AGAINST DRUGS.”) Britain then waged a successful war against China to keep open its profitable opium trade. A result was that the opium trade from India to China skyrocketed.

Since silver was the medium of exchange for opium, Chinese silver was draining out of the country. China responded by increasing its domestic production of the poppy, and cheap opium was available by the 1870s. Its use spread to all classes. This was not a happy-ending story with salutary lessons.

However, I was also struck by another fact in the narration. Stephen Platt reported that the Chinese during this time sentenced to death a person for “extreme indecorum.” Although I would not bring back that strict penalty, I would be in favor of that punishing that crime today…but only if I could administer it.