Stephen R. Platt

“And when those who sold it came back home, they did not”
― Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age

“So in the end, perhaps the tale of the foreign intervention and the fall of the Taiping (Rebellion) is a tale of trust misplaced. It is a tale of how sometimes the connections we perceive across cultures and distances—our hopes for an underlying unity of human virtue, our belief that underneath it all we are somehow the same—can turn out to be nothing more than the fictions of our own imagination. And when we congratulate ourselves on seeing through the darkened window that separates us from another civilization, heartened to discover the familiar forms that lie hidden among the shadows on the other side, sometimes we do so without ever realizing that we are only gazing at our own reflection.”
― Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War