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Home / People / James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin

Historical person

James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin

1811–1863

James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin, was a British colonial administrator and diplomat who served as governor general of Canada, high commissioner in China and viceroy of India. He negotiated the Treaty of Kanagawa-era diplomacy in Asia, ordered the destruction of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace in 1860 and died while governing India.

George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Dragon is set in Hong Kong in 1860, Flashman accepts money to escort what he believes is an opium shipment into Canton and discovers that he is carrying weapons for the Taiping rebels.

Series

Series featuring James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin (1 series)

The Flashman Papers in Order

by George MacDonald Fraser 12 books 4.2

The Flashman Papers present the supposed memoirs of Sir Harry Paget Flashman, the bully expelled from Rugby School in Tom Brown’s School Days who becomes a decorated Victorian soldier despite being a coward, liar, opportunist and sexual predator. George MacDonald Fraser places this fictional witness inside documented nineteenth-century…

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