River of Smoke begins with the storm that struck the convict ship the Ibis at the end of Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 Man Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies.
River of Smoke begins with the storm that struck the convict ship the Ibis at the end of Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 Man Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies. Redruth, the vessel of a Cornish plant-hunter, Frederick ‘Fitcher’ Penrose, sails in to Port Louis, Mauritius, two days after the Ibis, while the Anahita, belonging to Bahram Modi, a Bombay opium merchant, encounters the same storm on the other side of the Indian Ocean.
Counting the cost of their voyages, characters from all three ships make their way to the Chinese port of Canton. It is 1838, and the emperor is determined to eradicate the import of opium, a traffic run by the East India Company. This will lead to the Opium Wars between China and Britain, but Ghosh’s interest is in the detail of life in the foreign enclave of Canton during the months of rumour and intrigue before the invasion, as the merchants debate what they should do with their cargoes of contraband anchored offshore.
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