Opium, China, and a dark legacy
How opium came to China, the role of India in opium production, and the severe addiction issues brought upon by the trade.
This exploration starts not with a story, but with a fascination for a piece of art:
I’ve always been intrigued by the texture, the mellow cream colours, and the orderly but impressive scale of production in the picture. I’m not sure where I first encountered it, but it wasn’t until recently that I learnt about the darker story beneath its beauty.
The art is from Patna, a city in Northeast India hugging the Ganges River to the north, depicting a stacking room in an opium production centre - a facility run by the East India Company (EIC). The EIC was an English (and later British) joint-stock company, established in 1600, whose original goal was to help facilitate trade by English merchants in and around the Indian Ocean. They eventually came to rule large swathes of India, with the British Crown later taking over in 1858; but before delving too far into the history of the EIC, let’s take a step back and discuss how opium became introduced in nearby China, and then return back to the role of the EIC.
Nobody knows exactly when opium was first introduced to the Chinese mainland, but the best estimates suggest that it might have arrived during the 7th Century, brought in by Arab merchants. Interestingly, the Chinese name for opium was af-yong, which is remarkably similar to the Arab version, af-yum, supporting the idea that opium was introduced through Arab trading routes. Domestic production, on the other hand, is only estimated to have commenced by the 11th century. (Side note: opium was known as “Hul Gil” or “joy plant” as far back as 3000 B.C. by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia).
But what was opium used for initially?
Records suggest that it found use both as an aphrodisiac, referred to as chun yao, and to preserve what the Chinese refer to as life force, or qi. In a 1776 book, Yingjing Juan, the author Xu Boling notes that:
It is mainly used to treat masculinity, strengthen sperm, and regain vigour. It enhances the art of alchemists, sex and court ladies. Frequent use helps to cure the chronic diarrhoea that causes the loss of energy [...] Its price equals that of gold
Another writer, Yu Jiao, similarly outlined the qualities and usefulness of opium at the time:
My friend Yao Chunpu bragged to me about the marvels of opium. He said that it smelled fragrant and it tasted pure and sweet. When depression was drizzling and melancholy settled in, you lie down facing the partner on the low bed with a short lamp, take turn to inhale. At the beginning your spirit is refreshed, your head is cleared and eyes sharpened. Then your chest and diaphragm are suddenly opened and your mood is many times better; before long your muscles are softened and your eyelids close. At this point, you doze off on the pillow, detached from any thoughts as if you were in a dream world. Your spirit and soul are calmed; it really is a paradise. I smiled and said ‘it looks like that, but it is not so.’ Recently among the four classes of people, only peasants do not taste it, many officials indulge in it. As for the brothels, everyone is equipped with it as a bait to allure clients.
By the 16th century, the lucrative opium market incentivised foreign entrance, with imports of opium booming from nearby India. Recognising the value of the opium trade, the Mughal emperor Akbar (1556-1605) introduced a state monopoly on poppy production, establishing trade routes in East Asia and providing a stable source of income for the empire. But this rise in opium importation and production started to create issues in China. During the 17th century, the coastal areas of the country were particularly prone to facing addiction issues, since coastal ports had access to greater volumes of the substance:
The first wide-scale opium addiction problem was detected in the port of Amoy (Xiamen) in Formosa (Taiwan) in 1683. In response to rising addiction levels, Chinese emperor Yongzheng issued a decree banning the import and sale of opium in 1729, threatening violators, inter alia, with confiscation of their ships. Around 13 mt [metric tonnes] of opium were imported into China at the time. The ban was initially vigorously enforced, and had the effect of both slowing the spread of the problem and dramatically increasing prices. It also marked the beginning of the opium smuggling industry.
Why was China so vulnerable to the increase in opium supply? Some suggest that while India had a relatively rich history of consuming opium, they ingested, rather than smoked, the opium. In China, however, the smoking of opium with tobacco meant that the addictive properties of opium increased substantially - which could explain why opium addiction proved to be a greater issue in China than in India.
But despite the efforts of the Chinese emperor to curb the opium trade, imports continued to increase during the latter half of the 18th century, forcing the new emperor, Jiaqing, to introduce a new opium smoking ban in 1796 and an importation ban in 1800. Despite this, addiction really took hold during the early 19th century, when the EIC ramped up their production and trade.
But how did the EIC take over Indian opium trading?
The British had already established contact with the coastal trading ports of China, opening a trading station in Canton, now known as Guangzhou, in 1715. (Side note: all trade was concentrated in Canton in a relatively small area, much to the dismay of foreign merchants. This policy was referred to as the Canton System, serving as a way to control trade with the West.) But British trading only really started to flourish much later, following the Battle of Plassey in 1757, pitting the EIC against the Nawab (ruler) of Bengal. Having defeated the local Nawab, they gained control of Bengal and Bihar - the two main opium-producing areas in India.
Why was the opium trade such a valuable asset for the EIC? Establishing monopoly rights on the trade meant that the profits could be used for military expenditures to expand their presence on the Indian sub-continent, further tightening their hegemonic grip on Indian affairs. Of course, direct opium trading had been banned by Chinese authorities in 1800, but there were creative ways of indirectly trading without compromising on their diplomatic relations:
The drug was sold in Calcutta [in India] to licensed merchants, who shipped the opium to British-owned warehouses in the free trade area in Canton (Guangzhou). From here, the opium was smuggled by Chinese traders – often with the help of corrupt customs officers – outside the British zone and to the rest of the country. The British East India Company was thus able to deny responsibility for importing opium and retain its other trading rights with China.
Because the EIC had a monopoly on the trade, particularly during the early 19th century, they heavily regulated their export to keep prices high. But over the next couple of decades, competition intensified. Opium from Persia and Turkey was competing with the Indian-produced opium, with American merchants serving as go-betweens for Persian and Turkish opium producers and their Chinese merchant counterparts. Consequently, as the monopoly powers of the EIC dwindled, they were forced to rapidly increase their supply of opium. In India, this meant that “the area under opium poppy cultivation in Bengal (India), for instance, was increased from about 36,400 hectares in 1830 to 71,200 hectares by 1840”. (It was in fact around this time the picture from earlier was drawn, depicting the production centre in Patna.)
The result? Opium supply in China exploded, particularly around 1820, where the EIC was forced to increase their supply to compete with opium from elsewhere. Just look at how rapidly imports of opium increased in China:
Understandably, this trend was concerning. Opium didn’t just come to be seen as a health issue, it represented a disturbance of social order. In 1839, the Chinese emperor appointed Commissioner Lin Zexu to contain the opium trade.
His first major action? The confiscation and destruction of over 20,000 chests (1,400 tonnes) of British opium in Canton.
Enraged, British ships sailed to Hong Kong, destroying a Chinese blockade on the Pearl River, which extends downward from Canton (Guangzhou) to Macau and Hong Kong. Unable to make any headwind through diplomacy, the British forces continued their offensive action, with the British parliament approving an expeditionary force to attack. The British knew that access to trade was crucial, using opium to fund their fondness for Chinese tea as well as to reduce their silver trade deficit (the British, without opium, only had silver to offer in exchange for Chinese goods, draining their silver supply).
Following approval from parliament, the British forces swiftly dispatched the Chinese troops and navy. In the spring of 1842, the British captured Nanjing (Nanking), which effectively ended the fighting. Humiliated, the Chinese were forced to sign the Treaty of Nanjing, ceding control of Hong Kong to Britain, paying compensation for the destroyed opium, and increasing the number of ports that the British could trade in. While they could previously only trade in Canton, the treaty resulted in four other ports being opened, including Shanghai.
Just over a decade later, history seemed to be repeating itself. In 1856, Chinese officials boarded The Arrow, a Chinese ship registered by the British (and flying a British flag), arresting several crew members and lowering the British flag. To retaliate, the British once again attacked Canton, igniting the second opium war. The French also joined the battle, using recent attacks on their sailors and missionaries as an excuse to join the British forces. Even the United States and Russia offered to join, but their presence never became necessary.
The British and French quickly overpowered the Chinese forces, once again forcing the Chinese to sign a treaty to end the war. The Treaty of Tianjin was signed in 1858, opening 10 more ports for trade, extending trading rights to all the countries previously mentioned, and legalising the opium trade. The sequence of events was humiliating for China.
But this is Untold Health, after all, so let’s explore one of the downstream effects of the Opium Wars, namely how they affected addiction patterns in China.
By 1906, an estimated 13.5 million people were addicted to opium. Now that doesn’t sound like a lot given the current size of the Chinese population, but back in 1906, that corresponded to 27% of the adult male population being addicted to the drug. 27%!
By some estimates, it might be the largest prevalence of opium addiction in world history, underlining just how ingrained the drug had become in Chinese society. Understandably, not everyone was happy with how things were going:
Popular hostility toward opium abuse and the opium trade in Fujian province was expressed in a number of ways, including the composition of anti-opium songs and poetry, participation in heterodox religious sects that incorporated opposition to opium addiction into their ideological agendas, active support for the late Qing/early Republican opium suppression campaign, and opposition to the forcible cultivation of poppies under regional warlords in the early twentieth century.
To many, it became the representation of China’s perceived inferiority, capping what is referred to as China’s “Century of Humiliation”, denoting Chinese suppression by Western powers and the Japanese from the mid 1800’s to the early 1900’s. As a journalist from The Economist puts it:
China has not forgotten the Opium Wars. The conflicts were a humiliation, exposing the hollowness of its claims to be the world’s most powerful empire. They set it on a quest, which continues to this day, to rediscover its strength. Every Chinese schoolchild knows that the modern drive for wealth and power is, at root, a means of avenging the Opium Wars and what followed. How the conflict is remembered still matters very much.
The social issues brought about by addiction therefore became a painful symptom of this humiliation:
Opium was feared for the appalling toll it took on the bodies and families of addicts, as well as the way it empowered the foreigners who peddled the drug. But anger at this growing social problem also derived from a broader sense of dissatisfaction with the declining quality of life, the resentment of inadequate or extractive methods of reform, and the growth of a nationalism that condemned opium as the most blatant manifestation of Chinese weakness and Western imperialist greed.
Foreign interest in the trade eventually cooled as domestic production began replacing imports, pulling foreign powers further away from China. The government also eventually stemmed the trade and limited the addiction issues plaguing the country, but it took a long time. While this period (the early 1900’s to the 1950’s) merits its own full re-telling, in short, the Chinese Communist Party initiated sweeping reforms in 1952 that relatively quickly mitigated the issue. In April 1952, they enacted the Directive on Eradication of Drug Epidemic, resulting in stern measures targeting drug kingpins, traffickers, and users. The country went through what can only be described as a collective cold turkey:
Though the campaign targeted mainly drug producers and traffickers, drug addicts were forced to quit their habit. The Central Committee's policy was that addicts should be rehabilitated collectively or individually in programs administered by the government and under surveillance of the masses, with the exceptions of the elderly and the sick, who could have some extension periods. This task was carried out mostly at the end of the campaign. With drug supply channels being cut off and the masses mobilised, drug addicts had no choice but to give up. [...] Most addicts were affected by the mass mobilisation and undertook rehabilitation at home with the help of family members and ‘under surveillance of the masses.’
During this campaign, people involved in growing, transporting, and/or trafficking illegal drugs were rounded up and punished with detention in labor camps or execution. By 1952, drug trafficking and abuse had nearly disappeared.
In the modern day, the country still has its issues with opium, but the introduction of opium to China served not only as a health threat for years to come, but also as a painful scar which still motivates Chinese nationalism to this day.
That’s the untold health story of how opium came to China, the role of India in opium production, and the severe addiction issues brought upon by the trade. Thanks for reading! Feel free to share the article and subscribe (below!) to get another untold health story in next month’s newsletter.
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