THE STEAMPUNK OPIUM WARS
National Maritime Museum
18.30-22.00
Thursday 16th February 2012
A satirical extravaganza about China, Britain, imperialism and drugs in the 19th century in verse & music. See narco-capitalists & Chinese lawmakers slug it out, take part in a poetry slam, and watch the weirdest tea ceremony ever.
What do the humble cup of tea and the opium poppy have in common?
Britain’s craving for chinoiserie in the 18th and 19th centuries resulted in a trade imbalance that threatened to empty the treasury. To pay for the tea, silks, spices and porcelain we liked so much, the East India Company sold enormous quantities of cheap Bengal-grown opium to China, turning an aristocratic vice into a nationwide addiction.
The profits from the opium trade made fortunes, earned revenues for the British government, paid for the administration of the Empire in India and even financed a large slice of Royal Navy costs. When the Chinese tried to halt the import of the drug, the narco-capitalists persuaded Foreign Secretary Palmerston and Lord Melbourne’s government to go to war in 1839. The first military conflict, lasting a bloody three years, resulted in the Treaty of Nanking and the transfer of territory including Hong Kong to British rule.
A dastardly tale of imperialism, drugs and warfare, the story of this dark episode in British history is told in The Steampunk Opium Wars, a satirical extravaganza hosted by poet Anna Chen inside the belly of the beast, the heart of Empire, the Royal National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
Government narco-capitalists and Chinese law-enforcers slug it out in verse, and members of the audience have the chance to write and take part in a Farrago Poetry History Slam.
Featuring Paul Anderson, John Crow Constable, Neil Hornick, John Paul O’Neill, Hugo Trebels, and Louise Whittle.
With music from legendary writer Charles Shaar Murray and The Plague’s Marc “The Exorcist” Jefferies; former Flying Lizards singer Deborah Evans-Stickland singing her mega-hit “Money”; DJ Zoe “Lucky Cat” Baxter of Resonance FM; and Gary Lammin of The Bermondsey Joyriders in the weirdest tea ceremony you’ve ever seen.
Have your photograph taken in your finest steampunk paraphernalia on stage by Mrs Sukey Parnell, who has exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery, and maybe see it displayed on the interweb.
Come and play with us …
More here:
http://madammiaow.blogspot.com/2012/01/opium-wars-extravaganza-at-greenwich.html
Free entry but book tickets:
http://www.rmg.co.uk/visit/events/lates-anna-chen-presents-traders
Any Steam Punk Socialists?
What can I say. Brilliant!
#John,ditto.and of course Scots played a leading role in this obscenity.
@1Any Steam Punk Socialists?
Didn’t know what is was. Had to look it up.
Liked the reference to the Royal National Maritime Museum in Greenwich as being “The belly of the beast”.
Sounds an intruguing event though and anything that sheds light upon The Opium Wars has to be good.
#1 Any Steam Punk Socialists?
There’s certainly some that seem to lean in that direction at least.
Start with The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJgKAzCM4Ys
Also maybe have a look at SteamPunk Magazine- http://www.steampunkmagazine.com/
Realistically, any kind of youth subculture is likely to have at least some socialists in it but equally unlikely to identify as socialist as a whole.
If you really want to get a feel for steampunk, both the good and the bad, I’d advise going along to a steampunk event. While this event sounds interesting and well attending for those in the areas, it doesn’t seem to be mainly targeted at those already in steampunk, if that makes sense?
I’m far from an expert but I can think of a few interesting intersections.
The 1991 founding novel of the genre, The Difference Engine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine, was written by two leftists (of one sort or another), William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, a few years after they founded cyperpunk. It’s basically about the class struggle in an 1850s industrial revolution hyper-driven by development of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace’s proto-computer. Marx is mentioned as a leader of the “Manhattan Commune” (the US has fallen apart). There’s an appearance by a rather odd troupe of communist artists from NYC too.
There’s a fair bit of steam punk in SWP member China Melville’s New Crobuzon novels (Perdido Street Station etc.) though he’s nothing if not highly original.
A few months ago we took our elder boy for his 7th birthday to a great steampunk themed show by the ever-brilliant Circus Oz. This is a non-profit collective deriving from radical 70s New Theatre that imbues its work with positive and progressive values.
And while Gibson and Sterling are seen as founding the genre most of the tropes were there in some of the 70s novels of Michael Moorcock such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlord_of_the_Air, which is more explicitly about the brutal imperialism underpinning shiny metropolitan cities alluded to in The Difference Engine. Moorcock is of course an anarchist and I particularly like his 1977 rant against right-wing SF and fantasy, ‘Starship stormtroopers’, http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/moorcock.html
Looks like a great show. When’s the world tour?
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