Foreign Mud (Faber Library)

This is one of a series of titles first published by Faber between 1930 and 1990, and in a style and format planned with a view to the appearance of the volumes on the bookshelf. Maurice Collis's account of the Opium War was first published in 1946. Opium - "foreign mud" - was smuggled into China in the early-19th century by British and other Western ships while their governments looked the other way. To the merchants it was a fair trade, particularly so because China refused to open up her markets to the world. To the Chinese court, however, it was an outrage: an affront to the dignity of the Celestial Empire by unruly foreign barbarians. War became inevitable.