China's Last Empire: The Great Qing by William T. Rowe

As part of my study of the 19th century and my growing interest in Asia I chose this book to dig deeper into Chinese history.  As the last book of the series called History of Imperial China it did make a bit of an odd choice, but I've added each of the earlier books into my queue for later reading.

I suppose the biggest theme of the book is debunking the Western myth that the arrival of Europeans (and later Americans) led to Chinese subjugation because of that country's natural inferiority.  The book makes the lucid point that Chinese and Western cultures were relatively comparable (perhaps led by China) when they first came into regular contact in the 17th century.  Only the advent of the industrial revolution nearly 200 years later did Western civilization gain appreciable ground in terms of technology and economic development.

The myth is also debunked by bringing to light that China's subjugation really came about due to internal issues that had been growing for some 50 years prior to the Opium War.  The High Qing period peaked in the 18th century with a rapidly growing economy (with growing trade both internally and abroad) and extended peace.  With the death of the Qianlong Emperor in 1796 the dynasty started to unfold.  His son and heir the Jiaqing Emperor could not overcome the rampant corruption and stagnation that grew below the surface during his father's reign, as often happens during periods of prolonged prosperity.

In contrast, the first half of the 19th century brought economic depression, internal war and balance of trade problems that drained the treasury for the first time in more than a century.  The latter point - the draining of precious silver bullion - ultimately led to the Opium War.  England had been trading large volumes of Opium, grown in it's Indian Empire, with China in exchange for silver.  Not only did this drain the treasury, it diverted funds away from internal investments (leading to a rapidly declining military infrastructure, for example) and lost many of China's great minds to opium addiction.  The dynastic cycle had come full circle from the disasters that had allowed the Qing (Manchus) to conquer the Ming rulers in the 1640s.

Fast-forward to the 1830s and enter the British, demanding that China open trade ports beyond Canton through which all trade had been limited.  China refused to give in, British ships opened fire and the result was the Treaty of Nanjing, which decimated Chinese hegemony in the region and changed its trajectory from that day to this.

A great read, one I'm only halfway through, but am enjoying thoroughly.