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Description
This is a nerdy-history-buff-post alert. You have been warned!

Rofl wow, I doodled this in my hotel room back in Put-in-Bay. It's been ages...

EDIT: LOL so just parodied this for me: [link]

SO. At the curry contest, when Lau and Ranmao were the only people in the audience who failed to sing God Save the Queen at Queen Victoria's entrance on horseback, and when Lau turned THIS look [link] on Victoria, I found that moment EXTREMELY significant.

The 19th-century Chinese had a GREAT number of reasons to resent the Victorian British Empire. Though in many ways a just and judicious monarch, Queen Victoria, solely through being the British Crown, surely represented imperialism at its bloodiest, most hegemonic, and most insidious to any citizens of a country under imperial rule.

Possibly the most marked memories of British treachery in Lau's early adulthood were the two Opium Wars: [link] Lau, who cannot be older than his late twenties, would not have been born yet even as of the end of the Second Opium War, but as you can read, the social and political humiliation China endured lasted for decades. Essentially the British encouraged sale of opium from foreign manufacturers to Chinese citizens in order to render the Chinese people more easily conquerable in both a military and social context, literally drugging them into pacifism. It was a brilliant and conniving strategy. In an ironic sort of social revenge, Lau becomes an opium dealer on the side while also becoming a foreign branch trade manager in Britain, and turns that very fate of the indolent opium addict on British citizens, while making shitloads of money for himself. Lau's "friendship" with Ciel is always tenuous for this reason, both because Ciel represents the British imperial aristocracy who so screwed over his homeland, and because Ciel is the "Queen's Watchdog" who constantly threatens to shut down Lau's opium den chain in Whitechapel, London.

All of this is probably why Lau as a roughly eight-year-old little boy, in a field of poppies in Shanghai, perceived the British men who lit the field and the butterflies in it on fire as THIS: [link] [link]
[link]

There is no way to over-emphasize the wicked depths to which European monarchs stooped to suppress their colonies at this time. Arguably the most brutal, also during this era, was King Leopold of Belgium's violent suppression of Africans in what is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Interesting that, during the Murder Mystery Arc, Lau insisted twice, and quite smugly, that Kunlun never does business in Africa and with imperialists in Africa.

Description
This is a nerdy-history-buff-post alert. You have been warned!

Rofl wow, I doodled this in my hotel room back in Put-in-Bay. It's been ages...

EDIT: LOL so just parodied this for me: [link]

SO. At the curry contest, when Lau and Ranmao were the only people in the audience who failed to sing God Save the Queen at Queen Victoria's entrance on horseback, and when Lau turned THIS look [link] on Victoria, I found that moment EXTREMELY significant.

The 19th-century Chinese had a GREAT number of reasons to resent the Victorian British Empire. Though in many ways a just and judicious monarch, Queen Victoria, solely through being the British Crown, surely represented imperialism at its bloodiest, most hegemonic, and most insidious to any citizens of a country under imperial rule.

Possibly the most marked memories of British treachery in Lau's early adulthood were the two Opium Wars: [link] Lau, who cannot be older than his late twenties, would not have been born yet even as of the end of the Second Opium War, but as you can read, the social and political humiliation China endured lasted for decades. Essentially the British encouraged sale of opium from foreign manufacturers to Chinese citizens in order to render the Chinese people more easily conquerable in both a military and social context, literally drugging them into pacifism. It was a brilliant and conniving strategy. In an ironic sort of social revenge, Lau becomes an opium dealer on the side while also becoming a foreign branch trade manager in Britain, and turns that very fate of the indolent opium addict on British citizens, while making shitloads of money for himself. Lau's "friendship" with Ciel is always tenuous for this reason, both because Ciel represents the British imperial aristocracy who so screwed over his homeland, and because Ciel is the "Queen's Watchdog" who constantly threatens to shut down Lau's opium den chain in Whitechapel, London.

All of this is probably why Lau as a roughly eight-year-old little boy, in a field of poppies in Shanghai, perceived the British men who lit the field and the butterflies in it on fire as THIS: [link] [link]
[link]

There is no way to over-emphasize the wicked depths to which European monarchs stooped to suppress their colonies at this time. Arguably the most brutal, also during this era, was King Leopold of Belgium's violent suppression of Africans in what is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Interesting that, during the Murder Mystery Arc, Lau insisted twice, and quite smugly, that Kunlun never does business in Africa and with imperialists in Africa.