How long does it take to read The Chinese Opium Wars?
The Chinese Opium Wars by Jack Beeching takes about 6 hours 27 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 27 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1975. 352 pages, about 96,800 words.
13 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours 45 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 27 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 2 minutes |
The page count is the median across 3 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
"Jack Beeching's enlightening account of a notorious epoch in nineteenth-century imperialism sets the background for China's view of the West today. In the 1820s British merchants were under pressure to expand trade with China to pay for its tea and silk. The only readily available commodity the British had to offer was high-grade Bengalese opium, distributed through the East India company. By guile, bribery, and violence, the drug habit was so successfully implanted in China that by the middle of the century opium was the largest single cash commodity in the world. The Chinese government's efforts to stamp out the destructive, though highly profitable, trade erupted in a series of minor wars with the West between 1830 and 1860, climaxed by the looting and burning of the Summer Palace. Known as the Opium wars and hardly remembered by the victors, they are still vivid in the minds of China's present-day leaders" -- from page 4 of cover.
Subjects: History, Opium trade, China, history, foreign intervention, Opium
