Fascinating stuff about the Opium Wars

Here. Including this:

"That the use of opium was prevalent in China before the first recorded British transport of the drug in 1733 (and well before the gunboats arrived in 1840) indicates that far from cold-shouldering the world and its goods, people of the Qing dynasty gladly received them. By the 1820s, Western merchandise was all the rage among moneyed urbanites, with retailers adding the adjective “western” to their products in order to up the price. It was this fashion for foreign stuffs that partly explained the craze for British-Indian opium, which, along with the exquisitely wrought pipes and instruments needed to smoke it, became a delicacy for the rich. It also relieved the terminally ill of their pain, was served at dinner parties, and was taken as a “smart drug” by students cramming for civil service examinations. Eunuchs in the Forbidden City inhaled it as a flight from boredom. If opium was illegal in name, then it was hardly ever so in practice, and as Platt shows, British drug peddlers “insisted they were merely filling a need they had not created . . . a self-serving view, but it contained at least a grain of truth”."