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had borne such eloquent witness, he died in 1826 of pulmonary failure, aged forty-two.
    THE OPIUM CONNECTION
    Thousands of miles from Li Yuyang’s family in crisis and the unfolding disaster in Yunnan, Fanny Godwin’s state of mind was deteriorating through the dreary summer months of 1816. While her sisters, Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont, seized their roles abroad in an emergingliterary and cultural revolution, she stayed at home in London to bear the complaints of her father and a hostile stepmother. This oppressive isolation, together with her unrequited feelings for the irresistible Percy Shelley, brought sadness and anxiety in waves upon her. The Geneva party had returned to England, without Byron, in early September 1816; but Mary and Percy avoided the unhappy Godwin house in London, instead staying in Bath. Fanny sought them out and, on October 8, met alone with Percy. Whatever passed between them, his cool, ambiguous behavior was the final straw for the abandoned Godwin sister. In a sad, regret-filled poetic fragment, Shelley later recalled how “Her voice did quiver as we parted, / Yet knew I not that heart was broken.” Fanny immediately left Bath, traveling on to Wales. The following day, in a Swansea hotel, she scribbled a note blaming herself and asking her loved ones to forget her. The chambermaid found her dead the next morning from an overdose of opium.
    The fact that a respectable and inexperienced young woman in Britain chose suicide in the form of a half bottle of laudanum demonstrates both opium’s easy availability in the immediate post-Waterloo years and the fact that, though valued for its medicinal properties since ancient times, the poppy’s dangers were not yet widely appreciated or regulated. In 1816, most English opium was imported from the Near East along the trading routes of the Mediterranean. But since British deregulation of the Indo-Chinese trade in 1813, the global market for opium had expanded rapidly, while the center of production and consumption shifted to the Far East. By 1827, Britain’s success in penetrating the Chinese market for opium had reversed the flow of silver between the trading partners, which had so long been to the advantage of the Chinese.
    From that point, the long-powerful Chinese empire suffered a series of crushing setbacks through the nineteenth century and beyond. It lost its leading role in world trade to Britain, certified by the ruinous terms of surrender that concluded the Opium Wars in 1842 and 1857. Consequently, per capita income for its citizens actually declined through the nineteenth century while the Euro-Atlantic zone raced ahead in economic growth and technological advancement. 21 For the ChineseCommunist Party rulers of the 1950s, looking back over the ruins of the “century of humiliation” that followed China’s first defeat by Britain, opium was to blame for the civil strife, famines, and military defeats that had ruined China’s once great empire and thrown the country into economic and social chaos. This anti-Western narrative—a pillar of Communist Party historiography—focused on the evils of imported opium, a market Great Britain had unscrupulously created and kept open with military force.
    Our Tambora story, however, takes us further back in time in the history of Chinese opium to the site of what would become the thriving center of domestic opium production in the Qing empire: the southwest provinces at China’s frontier. The Qing court had long been concerned with the importation of Indian opium by the British and sought to control the trade along its southern ports. Beginning in 1820, however, only two years after the end of the Tambora-driven famine, Chinese rulers in Peking were startled to receive reports from faraway Yunnan of a sudden explosion in opium production there. A poppy anticultivation program was instituted for Yunnan that very year, the first in a series of ever more desperate government measures to curb