Chris Murray is Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University. He is the author of Tragic Coleridge (2013), and Crippled Immortals (2018) -- a memoir about Zen martial-arts masters -- and has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.

• 1: A Classical Cathay and a Real China


• 2: 'Ancestral Voices Prophesying War': Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edward Gibbon, and the Warnings of History


• 3: The White Snake, Apollonius of Tyana, and John Keats's Lamia


• 4: Charles Lamb, Roast Pork, and Willow Crockery


• 5: Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay': British Progress, the Opium Trade, and Tennyson's Retrospection


• 6: A Greek Tragedy in China: Thomas de Quincey's Opium Wars Journalism


• 7: 'From those flames no light': The Summer Palace in 1860 and Beyond


• 8: Coda: 'All things fall and are built again': Yeats's Daoist Optimism and the Fall of the Qing Empire


• Appendix: Sara Coleridge, 'Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters" with a New Conclusion'

Fascinated and often baffled by China, Anglophone writers have turned to classics to provide interpretative paradigms and narrative shape to inform their understanding. This volume reveals key insights into British cosmopolitanism, which sought its bearings in the ancient past in encounters with Qing Dynasty China.