The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes.

Rating:
Summary: a balanced view
Review: This book deserves five stars. Not because it is an exhaustive account of the first war but because it restores the balance. We have many English language texts on this subject but Arthur Waley, the distinguished sinologist, has become, with this slim volume, an extremely good historian. Using Chinese sources, occasionally adding clarifications from elsewhere, he has achieved a delightful, wistful, plaintive, penetrative and endlessly readable slim volume that finally enables the non-Chinese language reader to enter into what really motivated officials and simple, if middle class, Chinese people in the opium war - the seemingly unbridgable gulf that to this day divides East and West is washed away in this collection of notes from Commissioner Lin's diary and elsewhere, recording what it was like to be there at the time, the perplexity of the citizen and revealing the Chinese, through their thoughtful comments and opinions, their hopes and fears, as precisely like you and I. Read it.