Few figures who were active in the English Romantic Movement are as fascinating as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Aside from his own visionary verse, Coleridge is famous for his colourful friendships with fellow-poets Wordsworth and Southey, and above all for his well documented drug-taking and creative use of opium.
The Moonstone, a priceless yellow diamond, is looted from an Indian temple and maliciously bequeathed to Rachel Verinder. On her eighteenth birthday her friend and suitor, Franklin Blake, brings the gift to her. That very night, it is stolen again. No one is above suspicion as the idiosyncratic Sergeant Cuff and Franklin piece together a puzzling series of events as mystifying as an opium dream and as deceptive as the nearby Shivering Sand.
The Opium Wars - The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another
In this tragic and powerful story, the two Opium Wars of 18391842 and 18561860 between Britain and China are recounted for the first time through the eyes of the Chinese as well as the Imperial West. Opium entered China during the Middle Ages when Arab traders brought it into China for medicinal purposes. As it took hold as a recreational drug, opium wrought havoc on Chinese society. By the early nineteenth century, 90 percent of the Emperor's court and the majority of the army were opium addicts.
In this remarkable autobiography, Thomas De Quincey hauntingly describes the surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings he took through London -- and the nightmares, despair, and paranoia to which he became prey -- under the influence of the then-legal painkiller laudanum.
Set in the turbulent days of the founding of Hong Kong in the 1840s. This the story of Dirk Stuan, the ruler - the Tai-Pan - of the most powerful trading comapny in the Far East. He is also a pirate, an opium smuggler, and a master manipulator of men.