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Barbarians
From an Imperial Edict of 1836
As the port of Canton is the only one at which the Outer Barbarians are permitted to trade, on no account can they be permitted to wander and visit other places in the Middle Kingdom.
Glimpse Through A Veil
Thomas Babington Mccaulay, British Secretary of State for War, in the House of Commons, April, 1840
What does anybody here know of China? Even those Europeans who have been in the Empire are almost as ignorant of it as the rest of us. Everything is covered by a veil, through which a glimpse of what is within may occasionally be caught, a glimpse just sufficient to set the imagination at work and more likely to mislead than to inform.
Symptom of Submission
The Illustrated London News describing the capture of Shanghai in June 1842
The battleship Nemesis ... set fire to the city of Shanghai which was occupied by our troops, its public buildings burned, its rich granaries, the property of the government, given up to the people. An incessant cannonade was kept up for two hours ere the enemy showed any symptom of submission.
... and a place to repent
Christopher Isherwood in "Journey to a War", 1939 with W.H. Auden on Shanghai
The tired or lustful business man will find here everything to gratify his desires. You can buy an electric razor, or a French dinner, or a well-cut suit. You can dance at the Tower Restaurant on the roof of the Cathay Hotel, and gossip with Freddy Kaufmann, its charming manager, about the European aristocracy, or pre-Hitler Berlin. You can attend race-meetings baseball games football matches. You can see the latest American films. If you want girls or boys, you can have them, at all prices, in the bath-houses and the brothels. If you want opium you can smoke it in the best company, served on a tray, like afternoon tea. Good wine is difficult in this climate, but there is whisky and gin to float a fleet of battleships. The jeweller and the antique dealer await your orders, and their charges will make you imagine yourself back on Fifth Avenue or in Bond Street. Finally, if you ever repent, there are churches and chapels of all denominations.
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