Monday, October 7, 2024

Ibis trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of smoke, Flood of fire) - Amitav Gosh


I first read a book by Amitav Gosh more than twenty years ago, during my first trip to Myanmar, when two Italian ladies on a boat ride along the Irrawaddy river gave me a copy of a short story collection by this Indian master. A few years later I got to admire his talent after reading "The glass palace" and since then I've read anything by him I've happened to come across.

This trilogy is a masterpiece. I can't even start to imagine how much documentation work went into its writing. The saga starts in India where a woman manages to escape Sati (a practice according to which a widow is burned alive by sitting on her husband's funeral pire) and along with her savior boards a ship that transports indentured laborers to Mauritius. It then shifts to the Thirteen factories of Canton, the fulcrum of the opium trade from India to China. And it ends with the events of the first Opium war, where China is beaten and humiliated by the British navy, having to surrender Hong Kong and being forced to open a number of trading ports to the foreign powers. 
Having traveled in the area extensively I particularly loved the scenes that depict the first colonial settlements in Hong Kong and Singapore, which have since then become two of the biggest, richest and most important cities of the Far East. The name of Shamian, an island along the Pearl River in nowadays downtown Gunagzhou, also stirred mixed emotions.

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