Man-houng Lin, Research Fellow of the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica has recently published the Chinese version of her book entitled China Upside Down: Currency, Society and Ideologies, 1808-1856 in October 2011 (National Taiwan University Press).  In past scholarship, the Opium War tends to be considered as China’s historical turning point from prosperity to decline. In this book, however, the author uses early nineteenth-century evidence from within and without China as well as economic and intellectual analyses to point out that the global silver shortage incurred by the Latin America independence movement caused more devastation than the Opium War. Indeed, this global silver shortage almost led to the fall of the Qing regime. Although the later recovery of the global silver supply eased this crisis by supplying the necessary financial sources for the Qing dynasty to quell the Taiping Rebellion and other royal oak 15500 civil wars (partly caused by this silver crisis), China’s international status relative to Japan in the East Asian order declined since Japan had its own silver supply and was not ravaged by this global silver shortage. When China’s monarch was threatened by the global silver shortage, longtime submerged traditional ideas espousing the co-existence of plural powers came to the fore. Yet when the state power was strengthened using new financial sources to pacify the civil wars, authoritative, statist concepts of state power became reinforced and continued to influence later periods of Chinese history. The English version of this book entitled China Upside Down: Currency, Society and Ideologies, 1808-1856 was published as a Harvard Asian Mongraph in 2006. It has now been rendered into Chinese with considerable input by the author including her responses to more than 10 book reviews in English and a panel discussion on this book held during the European World and Global History Congress at the London School of Economics in March 2011. This book may be used as a reference for understanding global monetary history, the decline of the Qing empire, the study of the classics in the Qing dynasty, the literary history of Qing China, and comparative analyses of politico-economic ideas of traditional China and Europe.