The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes 1st Edition

This was a great read for my advanced history class!

Bit of a Dry Read

This is a scholarly read yet very poorly written..awkward phrasing and strange word usage.

The book never engaged me as I tried to read it. I lost interest after struggling through eighty pages or so.

Are we going to win in Afghanistan? NO. Why? Read about the real reason. History repeats it self all the way back to the 17th Century.

I was going through a used bookstore a while ago and ran across this book. My curiosity led me to purchase it, and I consider this to be one of the best purchases that I have ever made. Being from the United States it is rare that one gets a truly non-Westen point of view when it comes to history. This book is great because it is clear and concise, and very revealing. I have another book just as important called "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes" which is just as good. Again, I suggest them both for the sake of objectivity. TRUE OBJECTIVITY!!!

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.

I was first introduced to Waley's work with his brilliant translation of the old Japanese classic The Tale of Genji. Then I fell in love with his style enough to do my graduation thesis on his partial translation of Monkey (Journey to the West). So when I needed to know more about the Opium Wars, I naturally gravitated to this book. This work, together with more modern works that include information from declassified documents, make a great way to research the roots of the current worldwide drug abuse problem.