Category Archives: Books

Asia, Books, Britain, China, History

Book Review: Imperial Twilight

DARK TRUTH OF THE OPIUM WARS

THE Opium War began in 1839 in which the British and Chinese faced one another. It was a one-sided affair: The Royal Navy was the most powerful military force in the world, while the Chinese possessed weaponry that was centuries out of date.

The Chinese were reduced to desperate measures. One commander hatched a plan to strap fireworks or pyrotechnics to the backs of monkeys and catapult the poor primates onto the British ships in the hope that they would blow up their powder magazines. In the event, nobody could get close enough to launch the monkey bombs at the enemy.

The war was the end result of a decades-long, often fractious relationship between China and Britain, characterised by misunderstandings and ignorance on both sides.

Eighty years earlier, in 1759, there was only one British national, James Flint, who knew how to speak and write in Chinese. His attempt to present a petition to the Chinese emperor on behalf of the East India Company ended with Flint imprisoned for three years and the man who had taught him Chinese decapitated.

In 1793, Lord Macartney arrived in Beijing, bearing gifts from King George III including telescopes, a planetarium and a hot air balloon. The Emperor announced that they were “good enough to amuse children”. Macartney left Beijing having achieved little.

It was trade that finally brought the two nations together, but there were, unfortunately, two kinds.

One consisted of legal commodities such as cotton, silks and tea. The other was in opium, which the East India Company smuggled from India into China, where demand was high.

The two countries had very different attitudes to opium. In Britain, the drug was legal and sold by apothecaries and tobacconists. There was even a tonic for teething babies called Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup.

But China’s growing addiction problem was devastating its cities. Opium was illegal and punishments for using it grew even harsher.

The war was precipitated by the Imperial commissioner Lin Zexu, who confiscated vast amounts of the drug and threw it in the sea. (He wrote a prayer to the god of the sea apologising for his defilement of the waters.)

Charles Elliot, the chief superintendent of the British in Canton, sent a furious dispatch to the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, demanding military action. Some months later Elliot got what he wanted.

The Opium War was not the British Empire’s finest hour. The Times newspaper described it as “nothing less than an attempt, by open violence, to force upon a foreign country the purchase of a deadly poison”.

But the twilight of Stephen Platt’s title was not that of Britain’s empire. It was China that was in decline – and worse was to come. Now that China is once again one of the world’s great powers, knowing the history of its relationship with the West becomes ever more important. Platt’s book makes a scholarly, but enjoyable, contribution to that knowledge.

– Imperial Twilight by Stephen Platt is published by Atlantic for £25

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Arts, Books, Environment, Nature

Book Review: Buzz

NATURE

Buzz

Bees are brilliant and a much-needed species. And it’s thanks to wasps from which they evolved.

DO you know what Aristotle, George Washington, Leo Tolstoy, Sherlock Holmes and Scarlett Johansson have in common?

If you didn’t you might be surprised to hear that they were (or are) all beekeepers.

This lively, engaging book shows the human fascination with bees has deep roots. Stone Age art, from Africa to Europe and further afield to Australia, depicts honey-hunting expeditions. People kept bees before they tamed horses. The Hittites imposed fines on anyone caught stealing from hives. The Greeks had honey taxes.

Bees have long been central to our eating habits. “It’s often said,” Hanson remarks, “that every third bite of food in the human diet relies upon bees.”

He includes a table of 150 crops which either need or benefit from pollination by bees. They range from apricots to tomatoes and turnips.

Mead, brewed from honey, is one of mankind’s oldest tipples. People have been drinking it for at least 9,000 years. The ancient Chinese downed a version laced with rice and hawthorn berries; the Celts preferred theirs flavoured with hazelnuts.

The Mayans of Central America went one better and produced hallucinogenic varieties, spiked with narcotic roots.

Bee products have also proved invaluable in traditional healing. Of 1,000 prescriptions in a 12th-century volume entitled The Book Of Medicines, more than 350 made use of them. Honey was thought to be a remedy for everything from hiccups to a low sperm count. Beeswax could be used to treat loose teeth, aching testicles and sword wounds.

It’s little wonder that bees figure prominently in various mythologies. In some Greek myths, the god Zeus was raised by wild bees who fed him on nectar and honey. In cultures across the world, the buzzing of bees was interpreted as the voices of departed souls.

Bees are certainly remarkable creatures. They evolved from wasps. The first unequivocal bees appear in the fossil record about 70 million years ago. There are now around 20,000 different species around the globe.

Their antennae tune into chemicals which signal everything from potential meals to potential mates. Their wings can flap more than 200 times a second. One species of bumblebee can hover at elevations higher than the peak of Everest.

Bees, of course, evolved in tandem with the flowers on which they feed and which in turn depend on them to spread their pollen. In one sense, the colours of flowers reflect the nature of bees’ eyesight.

The prevalence of blues and golds in flowers is no chance matter. These shades fall right in the middle of a bee’s visual spectrum. On remote islands where there are few, if any bees, flowers are drab and colourless.

The development of scented flowers is also interwoven with bees’ ability to sense them. As Hanson puts it, “The fact that bees prefer odours we find worthy of poetry, counts as one of nature’s happier accidents.”

Plants need to attract bees to help them pollinate. They have devised any number of cunning strategies to do so. Some include caffeine in their nectar to get bees addicted to visiting them.

There are varieties of orchids which mimic the body shapes and scents of female bees to lure lustful male bees towards them.

The behaviour was recorded in the 19th century but prudish naturalists, including Charles Darwin, were puzzled. They thought the bees were attacking the orchids. They didn’t realise that they were actually trying to have sex with them.

 

BEES are now big business, particularly in the U.S. For a price, honeybees are sent by truck around the country, so farmers can improve bee-dependent crops. More than 10 million bees can be on a single truck.

Much publicity has been given in recent years to the alarming decline in bee numbers – so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Hanson acknowledges the concerns, but he is ultimately optimistic about the future. He is also a charmingly enthusiastic bee fanatic and his book is delightful to read.

– Buzz by Thor Hanson is published by Icon for £16.99

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Arts, Books

Golden Man Booker Prize: ‘The English Patient’

BEST BOOKER PRIZE IN 50 YEARS

The English Patient

Set at the end of World War II, this novel explores the lives of four very disparate people who find themselves holed up together in a ruined villa north of Florence as the war retreats around them. The author was awarded the 1992 Booker Prize for this book.

THE ‘English Patient’ has been crowned the best ever Man Booker prize winner.

The novel by Michael Ondaatje was chosen by the public as the recipient for the Golden Man Booker prize, a one-off accolade to mark its 50th anniversary.

All 51 previous winners of the prize were considered by a panel of five judges, each of whom was asked to read the winning novels from one decade of the prize’s history, before the books faced a month-long public vote.

The panel judges were journalist Robert McCrum, who chose In a Free State by VS Naipaul for the 1970s; poet Lemn Sissay, who chose Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively for the 1980s; novelist Kamila Shamsie, who chose the English Patient for the 1990s; broadcaster Simon Mayo, who chose Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel for the 2000s; and, poet Hollie McNish, who chose Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders for the 2010s.

Speaking about why she had chosen The English Patient, Miss Shamsie said: “The English Patient is that rare novel which gets under your skin and insists you return to it time and again, always yielding a new surprise or delight.”

The novel – written by Sri-Lankan born Ondaatje in 1992 – tells of the entanglement of four people in an Italian villa, including an English burns victim, as the Second World War ends.

It was adapted into a multiple Oscar-winning film in 1996 starring Kristin Scott Thomas, pictured.

Baroness Helena Kennedy, chairman of the Booker Prize Foundation, added: “The English Patient is a compelling work of fiction – both poetic and philosophical – and is a worthy winner.” The winner was announced at a ceremony at the Southbank Centre in London.

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