The Opium War in the West

There's an ocean of scholarship on the Opium War, but most of it lives exclusively in the scholarly realm. The more general public understanding of the opium war as it appears in Britain seems to have been mostly forgotten. There were very sophisticated arguments about by Chinese scholars about how to deal with a British military threat. They knew that this was a war that China should not enter and should not provoke. And just, I mean, in the basic smugness has to go out the window because this was a terrible immoral war.