Introduction
Opium has a complex history in China. As a physical substance, opium was the sap exuded from the head of ripe poppies that Indian and Chinese peasants collected and sold, it was also the tarry paste that merchants boiled up into marketable forms, it was also the commodity that businessmen used to capitalise commercial and industrial ventures, it was also the raw material that wholesalers refined to produce more intense narcotics like heroin and morphine, and it was also the toxins running in smokers’ veins. As a substance, opium was a palliative medicine, an item of recreational consumption, an addictive drug food, a way to store and accumulate wealth, a sign of national and ethnic degradation, and finally, a mechanism for transferring wealth and power between regions and nations.
Tobacco Smoking and Origins (before 1800)
The growth of Opium smoking followed closely the growth
of Tobacco smoking in China. Tobacco arrived in East Asia in the 1500s, carried
by European Ships sailing from the Americas. Unlike coffee or chocolate,
tobacco smoking caught on quickly in China as smoke was associated with
positive connotations in Chinese religion. It had medicinal qualities, the
ability to transmit messages from the mortal to the spirit world, and it had an
everyday utility in warding off odours and insects. Therefore, by the early
1600s, it became widely cultivated and consumed in China. Tobacco as a plant embedded
itself in Chinese agriculture by becoming a crop that provided livelihoods for
millions in China and provided a steady source of revenue for the state.
Tobacco was consumed both in public and private. Pipe
tobacco was sometimes added to tea, alcohol, and snacks. Its utility blended
well in Chinese culture as it became a convenient way for people to build
connections or “guanxi” as Western scholars call it. It would set the precedent
for Chinese material culture to adopt opium smoking.
Opium was first carried to China by Muslim traders from
West Asia, but opium as an object of recreational consumption begins in
Southeast Asia. Opium arrived in China at the southern coasts as part of the
wider maritime trade in the South China Sea involving tea, rice, and cotton. It
was first mixed with tobacco and consumed by Chinese in Southeast Asia. The
Chinese diaspora who worked in Southeast Asia enjoyed eating and smoking opium
and would reintroduce opium smoking to the Chinese scholar-elite back on the
mainland.
Opium’s entry was smooth as the trade routes and consumer
markets have already been established by tobacco and far-reaching maritime
trade networks. Despite smoking being an unfamiliar recreation in China,
tobacco acted as a gateway to smoking opium for the masses. Medicinal texts
also praised opium for its qualities as an aphrodisiac, assisting its
widespread adoption in the sex industry. By 1793 opium smoking accompanied by
sex on pleasure boats was well established in Canton. Scholar-officials who
frequent these brothels wrote extensively on the pleasures of opium and set
consumption trends for the masses.
This period was also a time of leisure and commercialisation of the Qing economy and therefore opium fitted seamlessly with the existing patterns of Chinese relaxation and recreation. Up to the early 1800s, opium was still an expensive foreign commodity and largely confined to men in the Southern Coastal regions and the governing elite.
Opium – Trade, Business, & Economy
Opium trade was conducted by rural dealers from the
coastal provinces. The Red Society, for example, connected inland consumers
with coastal import markets. It created a hierarchical shareholding enterprise:
where two founders at the top presided over a small group of investor-salesmen,
who managed teams of transporters and retailers, who sold the opium and passed
a portion of the profits up to the founders.
Despite opium being illegal, these dealers worked closely
with government officials to secure safe conditions of distribution and sale.
State bureaucrats often ignored the illegal import of opium as they relied on
revenue from its sale. During times of turmoil such as the Taiping Rebellion,
dealers found it impossible to supply opium to areas where imperial
administration no longer existed as they could not acquire official approvals
of sale from the rebels.
Opium’s Rapid Expansion
This status quo of opium smoking for the governing elite
will soon change as trouble was brewing over in India. Before the British,
maritime trade in Asia was largely dominated by the Dutch East India Company,
the VOC. However, the VOC ceased to be profitable and was dissolved in 1800. This
power vacuum was taken over by the British East India Company, who used opium
shipments from India to finance tea purchases in Canton. The outbreak of the
Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s also led to a British takeover of Dutch
settlements in India, Malacca, Ceylon, South Africa, and temporarily in
Indonesia.
During the 1820s and 30s, an emergent group of
cultivators in Malwa and shippers in Bombay begun to challenge the British East
India Company’s opium monopoly from Calcutta. The competition led to both sides
undercutting and taking smaller margins. To maintain profitability, great
effort was spent to massively increase opium production.
Hence, the volume of opium imports to China experienced a dramatic increase and “for a few coppers people could get a pipeful of opium, bringing its reach to both urban dwellers and the poor” (Jonathan Spence). Imports of opium rose from several thousand chests per year in the 1820s to 30,000 chests per year in 1830, and finally 40,000 chests per year in 1839 before the commencement of the First Opium War. Evidently, laws were constantly being violated and difference between legal and illegal, trade and smuggling, narco-actions and peaceful commerce were constantly blurred. Two infamous companies, Jardine Matheson and Dent & Company were the most prolific participants of this trade. Jardine Matheson is still present today in Hong Kong as a publicly listed company.
Prohibition & Opium Wars
The government’s response to opium was harsh. The Qing
court perceived that consumption of opium spread from commoners to the elite,
and from southerners to residents of the capital. Therefore, policies centred
around prohibition and focused on merchants and smugglers, both English and
Chinese, who have already been operating for at least four decades along the
coasts. For example, the court employed Lin Zexu as imperial maritime
commissioner in 1838 to stop the flow of opium into China. Lin approached the
task with zest and instituted draconian laws and destroyed many chests of
Opium. However, these efforts proved powerless against skyrocketing British
supply and Chinese demand. In my opinion, the state should have instead
legalised opium and diverted its trade into official channels. This way, it can
gradually tighten its grip over all areas of the supply chain and reduce the
total volume entering China.
That said, the Qing state had a weak control over the
coastal provinces. Historically, the Manchu conquest of the South was slow and
painful, pirate fleets dominated the coast and prominent merchant families
built maritime trading empires in faraway places around Asia. Therefore internally,
the Qing state had to engage in multiple tasks of policing, accounting, taxing,
educating, and managing the flow of opium around China. Externally, it was
drawn into a complex web of relations with individuals, businesses and states
involving opium and pursued many futile negotiations on the volume and legality
of the trade. Together with a lacklustre navy, the opium trade environment
would prove impossible to control and regulate.
Thus followed the First Opium War (1839-1842) in response
to tough measures against opium imports. British opinion on the war was not
unified as many perceived it as China’s right to ban imports of opium to its
own country. However, the artificially high revenues that opium brought clouded
the moral judgements of many. Economically speaking, it was too attractive for
Britain to resist the trade, as long as its negative impacts were restricted to
the Chinese. Therefore, the deprivation of its most important source of capital
swayed the English parliament to approve a military action. The war as we all
know resulted in the catastrophic defeat of Chinese forces and the granting of
concessions known as “treaty ports”. It also marked the beginning of China’s
“century of humiliation”.
Although the British saw the war as a restoration of
trade, the Chinese saw it as an attempt to corrupt the Qing state with opium.
Huang Yue, Minister of Ceremony and later Finance during the reign of the
Jiaqing Emperor, believed that opium was responsible for China’s defeat at the
hands of the British.
The peace treaties forced China to legalise opium and
maintain low tariffs. Opium smoking after the war experienced an increase in
consumption and could even be found in remote villages. Commercial
establishments for opium smoking and prostitution, called 花烟馆 or
Flower-Smoke Shops, became more commonplace. During the inter-war years of
1842-1856, opium smuggling and cultivation also increased. Shanghai also came
to replace Canton as the capital of opium commerce. However, it is not known
how widespread opium was actually consumed in China, as historical records
often lump smoking statistics together with opium statistics and many scholars
suspect that the problem of opium addiction was overblown.
The Drug State
In any case, by the late nineteenth century, it is clear
that the opium trade cannot be controlled. Opium tax revenue had become crucial
to the economy of the late Qing state. A suitable term exists to describe this
state of affairs called “Narco-capitalism” which describes a system of
production, distribution, and profit accumulation where integrated
organisations like opium guilds and the state maintain large-scale operations
in the production, transport, wholesale, and distribution of opium and illegal
narcotics.
Fujian province in particular experienced a steady
expansion of opium poppy cultivation and production, often at the encouragement
of local authorities. These locally produced opium competed with imported opium
as a form of import substitution and was occasionally shipped abroad to compete
in overseas markets. Up to the 1920s, Chinese diasporas in Manila, Batavia,
Singapore, and Rangoon still maintained a constant and illicit flow of opium,
often together with cocaine, morphine, and heroin, synthetic derivatives of
opium.
Opium production is an extremely labour-intensive
process. One ball of raw opium required 230 hours of labour. One hectare of
land yielded only 13 kilograms and required 816 days of work. Despite this,
income from opium is much higher than any other winter crop so in the winters
of the 1920s, opium cultivation occupied two-thirds of farmland in Guizhou
province.
The expansion of opium was replicated in other provinces
and consumption spread to every strata of Chinese society. The recognisable
image of “Chinese Opium Smokers”, men sprawled on an opium couch characterised
the Western view of Chinese material culture during this time. Opium was also
becoming an item of female consumption. Although women smoked less than men,
they still smoke often either alone or in the company of other women.
Opium's Decline and Perspectives Today
One argument for opium’s limited impact on China was how
post-imperial Chinese governments managed to eradicate the opium problem in
such a short time. The Guomindang (KMT) government suppressed the opium through
anti-opium propaganda campaigns and highlighted moral, personal, and health
consequences of opium. This period also saw a concerted effort by Japan to increase
opium import volumes into China, a history that is often overlooked.
The advent of the Communist government in 1949 allowed a
strong, centralised Chinese state to finally suppress the production and
consumption of opium. At the same time governments across the world enacted
policies against the drug and views on opium gradually changed.
As the understanding of opium use changed, patterns of consumption
altered, and supply and demand decreased. However, there are both Chinese and
Europeans who took a benign view on opium, insisting that its moderate
consumption was less of a social evil than alcohol abuse in the West.
Whatever the broader viewpoints on the opium trade are, it
was neither part of a strategy to poison and demoralise the Chinese people nor
a harmless recreational product. Today, it has often been caught up in a
broader narrative of a conflict between an expansionist and capitalistic West
and a tradition-bound China. The problem of opium often becomes secondary to
the “clash of civilisations” that was occurring in this period.
Many Chinese today would claim that Western powers used
opium to victimise the people or use it as a symbol of China’s inability to
reform. This historical interpretation sits well with the aggrieved sense of
nationalism among most Chinese and resonates with many of the Western and
Japanese observers who accept guilt for the opium trade.
This interpretation also fits nicely with the political
claim of the Communist party that it had succeeded in both eradicating the drug
and resisting foreign aggression where previous regimes failed.
Conclusion
However, we should put aside moralistic arguments, as the
history of opium involves vast complexities across an evolving interaction
between commerce and the state. Opium was many things to many people, such that
it eluded whatever controls that regimes, legislators, and moralists placed on
it. A study of it warrants an understanding of political economy, material
culture, and interactions between the state and businesses within China.
This was only a brief overview on the complex history of opium. Many items have been overlooked. If you are interested in this topic, I recommend beginning with reading the book Imperial Twilight, a dramatic recount of the opium wars through the eyes of significant individuals involved.
References
Benedict, Carol. 2011. Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010. University of California Press.
Thilly, Peter. 2022. The Opium Business. A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China. Stanford University Press.
Derks, Hans. 2012. Opium Production and Consumption in China. Brill.
Zheng, Yangwen. 2003. The Social Life of Opium in China 1483-1999. Modern Asian Studies.
Brook, Timothy, and Tadashi Wakabayashi, Bob. 2000. Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952. University of California Press.
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