ABSTRACT
In June 1997, prominent Chinese director Xie Jin premiered his film The Opium War in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Costing over $10 million dollars to make and employing more than 50,000 extras (3,000 of them Westerners), the film marked the latest Chinese motion picture to depict China’s nineteenth-century confrontation with Great Britain. The scope, scale and cost of Xie’s Opium War was only the most recent in a long line of films that used the war as an impassioned backdrop underscoring just how potent a symbol the war remains in modern perceptions of China’s past. In an age when Adam Smith’s economic policies prevailed, many British felt their economic superiority simply reflected a “natural” economic outcome. Of course, Adam Smith’s economic policies did not factor in Britain’s not so invisible military advantage. The Opium War (1839– 1842) was far from a popular war among either the Chinese or the British.
