The Scramble for China

In the early nineteenth century China remained almost untouched by Britain and other European powers - ferocious laws forbade all trade with the West outside one tiny area of Canton. Anyone teaching a European to speak Chinese could be executed. But as new technology began to unbalance the relationship, foreigners gathered like wolves around the weakening Qing Empire. China should be opened, they believed, so they broke down its doors and built a new foreign world on Chinese soil....
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In the early nineteenth century China remained almost untouched by Britain and other European powers - ferocious laws forbade all trade with the West outside one tiny area of Canton. Anyone teaching a European to speak Chinese could be executed. But as new technology began to unbalance the relationship, foreigners gathered like wolves around the weakening Qing Empire. China should be opened, they believed, so they broke down its doors and built a new foreign world on Chinese soil. Humiliated by military disasters, racked by rebellions that cost millions of lives and ultimately invaded during the Boxer Uprising by thousands of foreign soldiers, it looked as though the colonial 'scramble for Africa' was being accompanied by a scramble for China. Would the country suffer the fate of much of the rest of the world, carved into pieces by the Europeans? Or could the Chinese adapt rapidly enough to maintain their independence - and hold out long enough for the 'yang guizi' (foreign devils) to fall out among themselves?

Robert Bickers' extraordinary new book tells this epic story both from the European point of view and the Chinese, reimagining these encounters between two equally arrogant and scornful cultures. The experience of China in this period is crucially important to understanding the country today, where the government relentlessly keeps the memory of this time alive and is determined never to be so weak again. Both highly original and brilliantly written, The Scramble for China ranges from the Qing palaces of Peking to the tiniest, most desolate colonial treaty port, from the great city of Shanghai to the strange isolation of the new European-staffed lighthouses that sprung up along China's coast.

Robert Bickers tells an astonishing story, one that combines squalor and romance, brutality and idealism, and one which changed the world.