Films from the Opium War
by Lu Shuhuai
About This Novel
What Viscount Macartney resented all his life was his trip to China in the summer of 1793. It was not all because he failed to live up to the sacred mission of His Majesty King George III. What he could not forgive was himself. He stupidly allowed officials of the Qing Empire to hang a notice written in Chinese on the mast of the envoy ship. The four Chinese characters for "Red Barbarians Pay Tribute" written in the notice were obviously humiliating and hurt the face of the British Empire. There was no proper reason to explain, so he must have been blown away by the hot eastern sun. The summer of the fifty-eighth year of Qianlong's reign (1793) was extremely hot. Even at Dagukou, the mouth of Tianjin Wei, the sun was baking the sea surface like an iron, and the sea water was like boiling soup, with bursts of foam.
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