Last night I started reading Amitava Ghosh’s latest novel in the Ibis trilogy – Flood of Fire. The novel, continuing from the previous one, has part of the storyline based in Canton in China during the Opium trading era.
Like many good novels, the storyline weaves in real life facts and characters. One of them being William Jardine, who first appeared in the 2nd novel the river of smoke, and is again present in the background (so far) in flood of fires:
Then, today I was catching up with the latest issue of The Economist, and came across this:
Interesting coincidence of timing.