When
America first met China will be the topic of a program by author Eric Jay Dolin
on Stonington and the China Trade. The
program will occur on Thursday, June 20, starting at 6 p.m., at the La Grua
Center, 32 Water Street in Stonington Borough and is sponsored by the
Stonington Historical Society. Mr. Dolin’s latest work, When America First Met China: An Exotic History
of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail illuminates one of the least understood areas
of American history, tracing our fraught relationship with China back to its
roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising
naval power from a battered ancient empire. It was shortly after the American
Revolution that the United States – with Stonington at the forefront – began significant
trade with China. When America First Met China explores the epic tale that included
opium smugglers, sea pirates, and dueling clipper ships. Stonington played a large part in the China Trade. The distances were vast and risks were many,
but profits could be huge, as the Stonington Captains Edmund Fanning and
Nathaniel Palmer soon discovered.
Both
Fanning and Palmer traded extensively in the orient and are both featured in
Dolin’s history. This program is free and open to the public. Books will be available for sale.
