Subtitle: Unearthing the Secret History of Imperial Green Jade
These reporters competently render a glamorous subject gloomy, and suggest that a dull subject is rather interesting. The glamorous subject is "Imperial Jade", the best, greenest, most glowing jade, found in remote Burma. The gloom is cast by the bad effects that power & money seem to have had on everyone rich enough to afford the jade. We start with the pathetically ineffectual emperor Qianlong, progress through the alternately wasteful and hypocritical sackings of Chinese and Burmese palaces (early armies destroyed what they couldn't walk away with; the British were organized enough to haul off most of the extravagances, but they spent a lot of effort on paperwork and runaround denying that they'd done it), have a side-note on Shanghai glitterati, mostly Barbara Hutton and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and wind up in the present day, in which the mines are run by slave labor even worse off than slave labor usually is. This last is really awful; for one thing, drugs, disease and modern military power have finally destroyed the tribes indigeneous to the jungly hills around the jade mines. For more than a thousand years, those tribes had been picking off enormous armies that tried to capture the mines, and to have them replaced by systematic immiseration does not make Modernity look like Progress; it seems more like an argument for Deep Green.
The only comfortable part is the authors' hunting facts through archives, frequently moldering ex-British archives in India. They could, for instance, find the letters from Corporal Puff denying that the Queen's troops would take anything for their personal enrichment; and then the auction announcement, at General Puff's death, that his estate was selling jewels from the coffers of an Imperial concubine of China. All the archives are falling to dust, and have been redacted by forgotten censors anyway; it reduces my faith in history.
ISBN: 0316525960
So wrote clew in History. | TrackBack