Amitav Ghosh · 2011 · sea

Amitav Ghosh's 2011 novel, the second of the Ibis Trilogy, set in 1838 on the eve of the First Opium War. From Bombay, the Parsi merchant Bahram Modi carries a fortune in opium toward Canton, where Western traders crowd the foreign enclave of Fanqui-town and a Chinese commissioner prepares to burn their drug. Braiding merchants, painters, plant-hunters and the storm-tossed survivors of the schooner Ibis, it is a teeming, polyglot portrait of Canton at the moment history turned. The route here follows one thread of a many-ship epic.

1. 1
   Bombay

   Bahram Modi, a self-made Parsi opium merchant, sails from Bombay aboard the Anahita with the greatest cargo of his life, bound for the markets of China.

2. 2
   Mauritius

   A great cyclone in the Indian Ocean scatters his ship and others near Mauritius, the island where the trilogy's castaways and convicts keep washing ashore.

3. 3
   Macau

   Regrouping at Macau among the foreign traders and their go-betweens, the fleet presses on toward the Pearl River.

4. 4
   Canton

   And up the river of smoke to Canton and the foreign factories of Fanqui-town, where Commissioner Lin moves to choke the opium trade and the world tips toward war.