With a seemingly banal title, this book offers a great promise: introducing postcolonial theory into the study of Anglo-China relations in modern times. And it has succeeded in doing so. In studies of the British Empire of the nineteenth century, its relations with China under the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) constitutes only a small part of its colonial expansion in Asia, trailing in significance with its occupation and rule of India. The British, of course, were interested in knocking on and prying open the doors of the self-indulged Celestial Empire of the Far East, but its military involvements there seemed on an ad hoc basis, lacking long-term planning. In the China field, however, the Qing dynasty's conflict with the British invasion, resulting in the first and second Opium Wars of 1838–42 and 1856–60, respectively, constitutes a crucial period in modern Chinese history. In fact, these wars have still been used by today's Chinese in marking the beginning of a modern era in their history.

If the British seemed not interested in establishing a full-fledged colonial rule in China as it had done in India, what was their goal in dealing with the Qing? This is what James Hevia attempts to answer in this book. To him, if the British were brought to China in the nineteenth century out of an interest in trade and commerce; once they began their dealings with the Qing, they also sought another goal, which was to teach the Chinese a “lesson,” hence the book's title. That is, the British intended to force the Chinese to accept and embrace the Western form of civilization, which included, first and foremost, the “proper” protocols of international relations set up by the Europeans in the early nineteenth century that they now instructed the Qing court to abide by. To this end, the British not only sent its naval forces to subdue the Chinese, they also “uplifted” them culturally by teaching them English and British-Western cultures and etiquettes. The Western colonization of the non-Western world, argues Hevia, was a messy, multifaceted, and temporal operation, in which military coercion only constituted one component. Thus, though China was never formally colonized by Western powers, it could become a good case for postcolonial study all the same, for like other Western colonies, China was subjected to “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” by Western colonialism. If the Western military aggression against China was aimed at “deterritorializing” China, the cultural “lessons” delivered by the West were for “reterritorialization,” educating the Chinese to live up and conform to the “standards” of the modern world established by the Euroamericans (17–25).

Hevia tells his story chronologically in three parts; all of them focus on the “cultural activities” of the Western colonial operation in China. In the first part, he delineates the second Opium War, its cause, process, and consequence. There is an obvious reason for him to begin the book with the second Opium War, but not the first, because after its defeat in this war, the Qing court began to show its receptiveness to Western laws and culture, for example, setting up the Zongli yamen, an office designated to handle Qing's affairs with all Western powers. This change on the Qing part also made it possible for the English to introduce its cultural mission, which is the subject dealt with in the second part of the book. In the third part, Hevia describes the Boxer Rebellion in the early twentieth century and examines its short-term impact on the Western perception of China and the long-term impact on the Chinese perception of the West and its colonial and imperial legacy up to this day.

If the structure of the book appears to be a history of the Anglo-China conflicts between 1850s and 1900s, it indeed is. However, it also offers a different reading of the history. In Hevia's opinion, all previous studies of the history, ranging from Marxian school to the “Harvard School” of China studies led by John K. Fairbank as well as the school's critics, suffer from one shared problem—they all tend to view arbitrarily China and the West as holistic and absolute entities. But in fact, history itself is more complex than the historians have thought it is. Drawing on postcolonial theory, Hevia argues that the British operations in China were more like a “form of ‘palimpsestual’ inscription and reinscription” (22–23). In other words, the “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” did not occur just once, nor did they occur in an orderly sequence. Instead, they occurred repetitively without a presumed order or sequence.

A major reason for this “disorder” is that the “West” was not a unitary entity. In “dereifying” the “West,” Hevia offers fresh interpretations of the same history looked at by others before. In his study of the looting of the Summer Palace by the British and French soldiers in the second Opium War, Hevia calls our attention to the auction the British army organized in Beijing in 1860. To him, this auction has multifarious cultural meanings. Not only did it translate the war atrocity into a commercial activity and an “honorable” act to seek retribution and reclaim the respect for the British, it also had implications beyond the scope of the Britain-China binary relation, in that the Indian soldiers who witnessed the auction learned from the experience and later disciplined themselves when another chance of looting occurred in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion (74–118). The Qing, Hevia tells us, was not moribund either. During the 1860s and the 1890s, while the Qing seemed passive in its dealings with the British, it actually succeeded in retaining Xinjiang in the northwest by fending off Russia (166–174). These new findings aside, the book also has an interesting ending. In the last chapter, Hevia presents us how the Chinese today remember the late Qing history with anger and shame, which suggests that notwithstanding the effort of the English, their pedagogy in teaching the “lesson” of civilization failed after all. However, though the “lesson” is not appreciated, Hevia's study of it deserves high accolades. His fresh interpretative framework, deft use of historical sources, and lucid stylistic representation are examples of excellent scholarship.