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When the emperor refused, a squadron of Britain’s most up-to-date warships arrived in 1840 to brush aside the Celestial Empire’s junks and blast its coastal towns into ruins.

In a lesser-known novel, “Claudius Bombarnac,” Jules Verne describes the adventures of the titular foreign correspondent as he rides the “Grand Transasiatic Railway” from the “European frontier” to “the capital of the Celestial Empire.”

Having nothing to guide them in their thoughts but the world of matter around them, they have imagined that Hades is an exact counterpart of China, and that it has its emperor and great and small mandarins, and provinces and counties with exactly the same names that these have in the actual and visible lands of the Celestial Empire.

The Chinese hold that all that is Platonic nonsense, and is the reasoning of a barbaric mind that has never come under the benign influence of the sages and teachers of the Celestial Empire.

Equally accurate have they been in detailing the various symptoms of gout, scurvy, elephantiasis, and syphilis, which also scourges the “Celestial empire.”