In a war between two countries, usually it is the victorious countries' versions of the war that gets promulgated.
For the two wars fought during the later days of the Manchurian empire, it is however the Chinese narrative that had become dominant with the emphasis on the Opium Wars being the start of the hundred years of humiliation for the Chinese. And the Manchurian emperor who ruled during the first Opium War is often described in Chinese as 昏庸的道光皇帝 (the inept Emperor Daoguang).
Julia Lovell's The Opium War however, does not completely pin the blame of the Manchurian losses solely on the Manchurian Emperor, instead recognizing that the Emperor might mostly have been fed half-truths or even complete lies by his subjects. This actually makes the Chinese saying 山高皇帝远 (the mountains are high and the emperor far away) a lot of sense. If the Manchurian Emperor himself was unable to know the truth of something happening in his own empire, perhaps Queen Victoria experienced the same, with London being so much further away from Canton compared to Peking.
In all fairness, Emperor Daoguang might have been a flawed emperor, yet to not recognize the roles that the English and Chinese traders and Manchurian officials played in the trade deficit fiasco that eventually morphed into a war in which one empire did not even realise was incoming would make the two Opium Wars a very expensive missed lesson.
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