Building The City Of Mammon by Andrew Wareham

1850 and China is descending into chaos. In the south, the Taiping’s Heavenly Kingdom are entering into rebellion, destroying the first Imperial Army to come against them and killing the initial one million of more than twenty million who will die in fifteen years of crazed bloodshed.The Qing is utterly out of touch with its Empire, does not understand or know what is happening, and is concerned far more with the gwailos – the English and Americans and French – who are disrupting their placidity.The foreigners are out to profit and are about to turn a stretch of mud on the banks of the Yangtse into the wildest, most open city on earth – Shanghai.Queen Victoria’s British have the advantage in the creation of the Treaty Port of they have access to the poppy fields of India and can sell opium in hundreds of tons. They have the experience of selling from the factories of Canton and are now set to expand into the bulk of China, offering the joys of Western civilisation, Bible in one hand, opium pipe in the other.