https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7651-9288
-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Paul D Barclay, Puppet Flower, The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1026–1028, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae239
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Yao-Chang Chen. Puppet Flower: A Novel of 1867 Formosa. Translated by Pao-fang Hsu, Ian Maxwell, and Tung-jung Chen. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023.
The First Anglo-Chinese War of 1839–1842, also known as the Opium War, is remembered in Chinese historical memory as the start of a “century of humiliation.” The 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, signed at the war’s conclusion, was the first of many “unequal treaties” ratified by the reigning Qing dynasty and Western nation-states. These documents codified commercial rights for foreigners in the port cities of China, and subsequently in Japan, Thailand, and Korea. Asian treaty ports became beachheads for the extension of the European-centered system of international diplomacy and global capitalism into Asia. Their imposition provoked violent reactions from brunt-bearing East Asians, famously boiling over into anti-dynastic rebellions in China, Japan, and Korea. Therefore, the “treaty-port system” is commonly regarded as an emblem of Western imperialist aggression and a seedbed of East Asian nationalism.
