OPIUM WARS
The operations of the First Opium War (1839–42) have been described elsewhere in some detail, and no more than an outline is required here. Though the British expeditionary force needed to be scrambled together from a number of locations, some of them halfway around the world – Britain itself but also the Cape and Australia, besides India – it enjoyed an insuperable advantage in armaments and tactics. The invading force was spearheaded by three 74-gun ships of the line, followed by a number of frigates, corvettes and transports. It also counted four steamers, including the massive Nemesis, able to navigate the Pearl River estuary’s flats, land troops at coastal weak points and bombard forts at a dead angle or out of range from fixed-emplacement Chinese cannons.1 China’s armaments were wretched. On water, its war junks were unwieldy, slow and hopelessly outgunned. On land, its troops made use of rusty cannons burning coarse and ineffective gunpowder, and they sheltered in roofless forts quickly turned into killing grounds by enemy artillery. British and Indian soldiers carried breech-loading rifles capable of fast firing. Chinese muskets made use of tiny bullets triggered by a slow-burning matchlock. But even muskets were rare. Chinese and Manchu troops – much of the Qing army continued to be recruited from populations identified in speech and dress as Manchu, after the Qing home base in Manchuria – often wielded no more than bows and arrows, swords, spears or halberds, and they wore iron helmets, shields and even chain mail.2
An operation early on in the offensive on Canton provides an illustration of the result. The Chinese commander had entrenched his forces on two islands, named Chuenpi and Taikoktow, overlooking the passage into the Pearl River estuary’s neck. A line of chained wooden rafts blocked the entry into the waterways, also protected by a fleet of war junks. On the morning of 7 January 1841, 1,400 British marines, infantry and artillery attacked the granite forts on the islands. Because they landed by steamer, the troops were able to approach the fortifications from the rear and flanks. Chuenpi fell after a 25-minute artillery barrage convinced its defenders to scatter. An hour later, Taikoktow was stormed, its men and their commander mown down by gun and rifle fire. The Nemesis then turned to the war junks, which had been hanging back in waters their commander judged too shallow for the British fleet to penetrate. The steamship approached and fired. Almost immediately, a Congreve rocket hit the powder store of one of the junks, causing it to blow up ‘with a terrific explosion, launching into eternity every soul on board’. The sailors abandoned the rest of the fleet. On the Qing side, 280 were dead and 462 wounded. On the British side, 38 were wounded and none killed.3 Operations were over by noon.
That the First Opium War was actually about opium has sometimes been contested, beginning with imperial apologists claiming that it was really fought to open a commercially and politically closed China, or that it represented an inevitable clash between a rising Britain and a stagnant Qing empire. At the other extreme, Britain has been accused of plotting to force opium on China with the explicit motive of weakening it for future colonization.4 Actually the war was launched in the aim of recovering the sums Charles Elliot had promised the opium merchants and to keep a trade going that was an important fiscal prop to colonial India.5 ‘The real cause of the outbreak with China in 1839 was the prodigiously increased supply of opium from India after the Company had lost the monopoly of regular trade in the year 1834,’ wrote Elliot himself.6
The merchants’ claim was estimated, at the beginning of the war, at £2.4 million.7 This was on its own a large sum for the government to take on: Britain’s budget for 1840 amounted to no more than £53.4 million.8 In addition, opium made an annual contribution to the East India Company of £1 million.9 Finally there was tea, the trade in which had been halted as a result of the fight over opium. The duty on that item, imported almost entirely from China, was £3–4 million per annum, not a sum the exchequer could simply replace.10 Leaving drugs aside, it is drug dealing that is addictive. The easy money is impossible to surrender. The wealth generated comes to be regarded as an entitlement, and violence beckons as a natural resort in safeguarding it. It was easier to make China pay and claim that Lin’s actions had affronted British honour.
The expeditionary force, approximately 3,500 strong, initially headed not for Canton but for the island of Zhoushan, strategically placed towards the mouth of the Yangtze. Arriving in July 1840, the fleet smashed the Chinese flotilla at anchor and took the island.11 George Elliot, Charles’s brother, acted as admiral, and from Zhoushan the two Elliots sailed further up the coast, before Tianjin, to deliver a message for the capital. The court agreed to open negotiations. Talks resumed in Canton and Macao in November, though they soon stalled.
From Beijing’s perspective, this still looked like no more than piracy on a larger scale. The court’s instructions to its plenipotentiaries were to bide their time while reinforcements were being gathered. In parallel, the expeditionary force fitfully renewed its advance up the Pearl estuary and took Canton at the end of May 1841. Charles Elliot had meanwhile been asking for the cession of the island of Hong Kong and an indemnity of $6 million (less than the merchants’ £2.4 million). The foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, thought these terms too modest. The Elliots were making no progress in the talks anyway. Palmerston dismissed the superintendent, and the war now entered a second, yet more brutal phase.
Elliot’s successor was the 51-year-old veteran of the Anglo-Indian army Henry Pottinger. He again concentrated his forces on Zhoushan, and from there he marched them up the Yangtze. Pottinger had received significant reinforcements: another ship of the line, half a dozen frigates and no fewer than eight steamers, plus fresh British and sepoy regiments now bringing the total to 10,000 men.12 The Qing had fortified their positions as best they could and had summoned more troops, but this remained an unequal fight. Between the winter of 1841 and the summer of 1842, the towns of Zhenhai, Ningbo, Zhapu and Zhenjiang fell to the invaders one after the other until the expeditionary force arrived before Nanjing. Scenes of pillage accompanied the campaign’s progress up the great river.
The great opium merchants may have looked like gentlemanly figures, exempt from the violence associated with latter-day drug bosses, but there was plenty of violence now. Chinese soldiers regularly ignored or failed to understand calls to surrender and died fighting to the last man. The victorious soldiery rampaged through the towns it overran. Granville Loch, a captain of the Royal Navy, described the capture of Zhenjiang on 21 July 1842. ‘Throughout the day both the Chinese and Tartar [Manchu] troops evinced a determined bravery, which commanded our respect,’ writes Loch.13 The city ramparts were soon taken in hand-to-hand combat, however, or as batteries blew their gates apart. Inside: ‘I saw, what as a novice in this description of warfare shocked me much, old men, women, and children, cutting each other’s throats, and drowning themselves by the dozen; and no one either attempting or apparently showing any inclination to save the poor wretches, nor in fact regarding them with more notice than they would a dead horse carried through the streets of London to the kennel.’14 Towards evening, an advance was sounded ‘towards the Tartar quarter of the town’. The invaders broke into houses and passed an official building or palace with a flying dragon painted on its walls, to which they set fire. Just beyond:
I went with two soldiers of the 18th down a street to the right, to a large house, which I concluded belonged to a Tartar of consequence: we burst the door and entered. Never shall I forget the sight of misery that there met our view.
After we had forced our way over piles of furniture, placed to barricade the door, we entered an open court strewed with rich stuffs and covered with clotted blood; and upon the steps leading to the ‘hall of ancestors’ there were two bodies of youthful Tartars, cold and stiff, much alike, apparently brothers. Having gained the threshold of their abode, they had died where they had fallen, from the loss of blood. Stepping over these bodies, we entered the hall, and met, face to face, three women seated, a mother and two daughters; and at their feet lay two bodies of elderly men, with their throats cut from ear to ear, their senseless heads resting upon the feet of their relations. To the right were two young girls, beautiful and delicate, crouching over, and endeavouring to conceal, a living soldier.15
The fall of Zhenjiang finally persuaded the emperor that the war could not be won. He despatched two Manchu aristocrats, Yilibu and Qiying, to agree terms. The result was the Treaty of Nanjing, signed on 29 August 1842. China would pay an indemnity of $21 million (in excess of £4 million). It would open to trade the five ports of Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai, allowing consular representation at these places, and would cede the island of Hong Kong to Britain in perpetuity.16
What was not part of the treaty was the legalization of opium. The negotiations took place in a surprisingly jovial atmosphere. ‘Young white-buttoned mandarins handed round tea, hot wine, and sweetmeats . . . Numerous patties of minced meat, pork, arrow root, vermicelli soup, with meat in it, pig’s ear soup and other strange dishes were served in succession,’ reports Loch. ‘But human nature could not support this ordeal long, and as a coup de grace, Ke-ying [Qiying] insisted upon Sir Henry [Pottinger] opening his mouth while he with great dexterity shot into it several immense sugar-plums.’17 All the same, the British government, beholden to the fiction that the war was a reprisal for Lin’s atrocities, felt that it could not force opium on China as part of the peace terms. Pottinger had only been allowed to raise opium ‘as a topic of private conversation’. The Chinese commissioners asked why Britain was not prepared to put an end to the trade. ‘This . . . in consistency with our constitutional laws, could not be done,’ replied Pottinger. ‘Even if England chose to exercise so arbitrary a power over her tillers of the soil [an outrageous caveat when one recalls that this is exactly what the Company did in Bengal], it would not check the evil so far as they (the Chinese) were concerned, while the cancer remained uneradicated among themselves, but that it would merely throw the market into other hands.’ He preferred to admonish the dignitaries: ‘If your people are virtuous, they will desist from the evil practice; and if your officers are incorruptible, and obey their orders, no opium can enter your country.’18
Across China, meanwhile, even if the war ruled out any further attempts to prevent opium from being landed ashore, suppression had continued in the interior. In 1841 the grace period for the entry into force of the death penalty for possession expired. There was a rush to clear cases before this warning period ended, and it is impossible to say exactly how many people were executed, but dozens of extant capital cases are documented as having been adjudicated in Guangdong, Beijing and elsewhere. Executions petered out after 1843, with 25 offenders listed that year, but actions against trafficking continued into the 1850s.19
The campaign, however determined, seems to have caught few kingpins. Most offenders were of a low social profile: petty entrepreneurs and peddlers, servants, labourers, entertainers. Bosses were sometimes able to protect their hirelings by introducing ‘relatives’ claiming to be dependent on the culprit, a factor considered an extenuating circumstance.20 Behind the statistics, nevertheless, hid just as many individual tragedies:
In January 1843, a Ms Li, who was 40 sui, was sentenced to death by strangulation for opium smoking. She had been suffering from stomach pains and bought some 35 grams of opium paste from a neighbour as well as a pipe from an itinerant Guangdong peddler. She was cured but was subsequently ordered by her husband, Wang Er, 38 sui, to dispose of her paste and paraphernalia because of the prohibitions. Ms Li instead buried these items in a rear courtyard and told her husband she had destroyed them. In 1842, Wang lost his job and decided to rent out his wife as a prostitute. Wang soon became a pimp for several other women and operated a brothel out of his residence. Around this time, Ms Li experienced a relapse of her stomach pains and retrieved her opium and paraphernalia from the back courtyard. On the day she resumed smoking, officials on a vice raid entered her home and discovered her opium, pipe, and lamp.21
As to the holders of Elliot’s receipts, they were paid out in August 1843, though at a disappointing rate averaging $300 per chest (for a total of £1.25 million).22 The trade resumed, and the great opium merchants would all enjoy haloed, moneyed retirements. Jardine returned to Britain a rich man. He promptly obtained a seat in Parliament, that ultimate Victorian gentleman’s accolade. Lindsay likewise served in the House of Commons from 1841 to 1847. Matheson succeeded in Jardine’s seat after his death and continued until his retirement in 1868 at age 72. He bought extensive lands on the Scottish island of Lewis, which made him one of Britain’s largest proprietors. He spent his years on committees and boards, including that of the Peninsular & Oriental shipping company. Jejeebhoy poured money into Parsee charities – famine relief, schools, hospitals – and into Indian public works. In 1842 he became the first native-born Indian to be knighted and in 1857, in recognition of his charitable activities, he was granted a hereditary baronetcy.23
‘China, we think, is essentially right, and this country is essentially wrong.’ The Record, Britain’s leading evangelical periodical, did not agree with the war.24 Back home, both the campaign to exact retribution on China and the trade itself were contested. The term ‘Opium War’ was not invented by aggrieved Chinese nationalists but by the British press. The label was popularized by such titles as the Morning Herald and the Northern Star to designate a war begun by ‘opium smugglers’ and ‘pestiferous smuggling rascals’.25 The years 1839–42 saw the first sustained public movement to arise, in Europe or the United States, against ‘this pernicious drug’.26 Public opposition to the war would set a marker for British repentance in the early twentieth century, with profound effects on the emerging drug-control order. Its immediate impact, though, was to quash any governmental urge to force the legalization of opium on China, and in turn set the stage for a later round of aggression.
The war was attacked in Parliament just as it was about to start, first in a long-running debate in the House of Commons on 7–9 May, then in the Lords on 12 May 1840. The cabinet almost lost the Commons vote – it would have been forced to resign if it had – which went 271 in its favour to 262 against.27 In the Lords, public censure was avoided only after a patriotic intervention by Lord Wellington.28 Motions were again introduced in Parliament against the war and the opium trade in July 1840 and April 1843. All this received extensive press coverage. If the opium trade had belonged to the expert’s domain, it now achieved notoriety among a broad reading public.
The merchants made their own effort to sway opinion in their favour, their first aim being to ensure that the government honoured Elliot’s promise of compensation. In May 1839 a group led by Jardine, Matheson & Co. despatched a deputation to London to argue its case, with £5,000 or ‘any amount of expense’ at its disposal to pay for lawyers and ‘literary men’ to perform the job.29 Lindsay published his own pamphlet and spoke personally in the Commons on the 1843 motion.30 Jardine had an anonymous booklet printed entitled The Rupture with China and Its Cause, which came out alongside a handful of similar tracts published in 1839 or 1840, most of them ostensibly to order.31 This literature recycled old tropes blaming the Chinese for the opium trade, or arguing that the merchants were only doing what others would do in their place. It sometimes defended opium itself, suggesting it was the Chinese equivalent of gin or dram drinking.
Against this, a broad-based campaign emerged against the trade. A group of pamphleteers took the lead in denouncing opium, themselves widely quoted in newspapers and magazines. Probably the most popular pamphlet was A. S. Thelwall’s The Iniquities of the Opium Trade with China. Thelwall’s booklet contained lurid descriptions of the effects of opium smoking on health, made all the more eye-catching by the exoticism of its Chinese vignettes. It quoted evidence to the effect that opium acted ‘like the spell of a demon’, causing ‘emaciation, loss of appetite, sickness, vomiting’ and so on, terminating in death.32 It and its fellow publications set out the basic arguments against the opium traffic for decades to come: besides involving a dangerous substance, the opium trade relied on smuggling, crowded out legitimate manufactured goods exports to China, and hindered Christian missionary work. A set of activists formed an Anti-opium Society bringing together a number of eminent members.33 The war and the opium trade itself were the object of campaigns by an array of press organs such as the highbrow Eclectic Review, the free-trade Leeds Mercury and The Times, Britain’s most widely read newspaper. The campaign of The Times ran, between 1839 and 1842, into tens of articles, letters and editorials. The editors, in the name of ‘honour’ and ‘humanity’, called for Parliament to ‘put down this abominable traffic’ and free China from ‘this poisonous pest’.34
This literature would in due time enter the canon on drugs in Britain and beyond. More immediately, it placed the government and war party on the defensive. The Morning Chronicle, for example, the chief Whig newspaper at the time and an unconditional supporter of Palmerston, found itself forced to deny that the war was about opium at all: ‘Fearful would be the responsibility of the Government, and deep-dyed the guilt with which they would have sullied and degraded our national character, had they permitted the battle flag of England to be unfurled in favour of a trade which bears, wrapped up in every case and bale it carries to the shores of China, delirium and death, and a moral plague more baneful than ever borne to a doomed people by “the pestilence which walketh in darkness”. The Chinese war has no such aims.’35
The government was forced to disown the trade even while it pursued the war it had caused. This, plus the change of cabinet that took place by 1842, explains why the Treaty of Nanjing included no condition that China should legalize opium. It would prove no help, though, to the Chinese. On the contrary, as would soon become apparent, the resulting limbo only paved the way for achieving the same end through a second war.
Deliveries of Indian opium, having resumed as soon as the war began, continued to climb in the 1840s and ’50s. Chinese imports reached a new peak of 78,000 chests in 1855, or approximately twice as much as before the war.36 Hong Kong now provided a safe distribution platform for the drug, and newly introduced steamships shortened the journey. Hopes for a surge in British manufactured exports were meanwhile disappointed. On the contrary, from the 1850s China’s trade balance turned positive again in spite of the opium purchases.37 The silver drain had reversed.
From that time, the Foreign Office began to angle for a renegotiation. In 1854 it appointed the political economist John Bowring as superintendent. The post, among other things, now involved acting as governor of Hong Kong, but Bowring was also given the mission of renegotiating the Nanjing terms. The British were hoping to get various new clauses agreed to, such as changes to tariffs and better access to the interior of China, but on their agenda was also the legalization of opium.
Bowring took his proposal to Tianjin, where he met with high-ranking officials. In 1856 he approached Ye Mingchen, the provincial governor in Canton. He was rebuffed both times. Upon hearing of Bowring’s failure, Palmerston, who was now prime minister but continued to have a hand in foreign affairs, contacted the Paris Quai d’Orsay. His proposal was for a joint military demonstration in China – the French being preoccupied with the fate of the Catholic missions there. The French responded cautiously but positively.38 The necessary forces were available. The powder keg was packed, and all that remained was to wait for the spark.
On the morning of 8 October, a young Irish captain named Thomas Kennedy was sitting at breakfast with some friends in Canton harbour when he espied his ship, the Arrow, being boarded by Chinese soldiers. The ship – a ‘lorcha’, a ship with a European-type hull but Chinese sails – had served as a pirate vessel before it had been resold and eventually registered in Hong Kong. Three of its sailors were known associates of pirates. They had just been identified by one of their old victims, who had alerted the authorities. As the Irishman sat looking on, a war junk boarded the Arrow, took prisoner twelve men out of her crew of fourteen, all of them Chinese subjects, and marched them out.39
Kennedy walked off to report the incident to the consul, Harry Parkes. He made much of the Hong Kong registration. As he told the story, upon boarding the Arrow, the soldiers had lowered the Union Jack that had been hanging from its mast. Parkes proceeded aboard the offending war junk, and on his visit behaved in such a peremptory manner that a Chinese officer slapped him. Incensed even further, the consul brought the matter all the way up to Governor Ye Mingchen. Ye, seeing his danger, promptly released the nine innocent men. Parkes demanded that all twelve be freed. The whole matter was intolerable, and he expected a public apology from Ye.
The Arrow was Chinese-owned. As Parkes soon discovered, even its Hong Kong registration had recently expired. It had been invalid at the time of the incident. Kennedy, besides, who had minimal seafaring experience, was only its captain on paper. He was almost certainly lying when he said the Union Jack had been hauled down – it would have been against nautical practice for it to have been up in the first place. Parkes nevertheless had the commander of a Royal Navy frigate cruising in the vicinity seize a Chinese war junk in reprisal – only for the two of them to realize that they had mistakenly boarded a private trading vessel. Ye, shrugging off this misstep, eventually agreed to release the three suspected criminals as well. He regretted he could not issue a public apology, however, as this would undermine his own authority. Parkes was irate. The governor’s conduct was clearly beyond the pale of civilized behaviour. Bowring wrote to London. On 27 October the British fleet began bombarding Canton.
The Arrow incident and the incipient war were the occasion for another heated debate in Britain in which a number of political luminaries – Richard Cobden, Benjamin Disraeli, Lord John Russell and William Ewart Gladstone among them – lined up on China’s side. In the House of Lords, critics found Parkes’s behaviour ‘grotesque’ and Bowring’s ‘unworthy’. This time the cabinet was actually forced to resign, in Parliament. Around the country, though, it was a classic triumph of the simplicity of untruths over factual argumentation. All the public heard was that Ye had hauled down the Union Jack and was therefore a monster. Palmerston crushed his opponents in the ‘Chinese’ general election that followed.40 The Arrow had not been carrying opium, and the affray around it had nothing to do with the opium trade. It may thus seem odd to call the war that ensued a Second Opium War. The Arrow War, however, would achieve the goal Palmerston and Bowring had beforehand established: the legalization of opium imports into China.
This time the Chinese were better prepared, and though the outcome was never in doubt, the war was more hard-fought. The Qing, separately, were locked in a mortal struggle with a rebel army known as the Taiping, hobbling what resistance they could put up to the European invaders. British forces were meanwhile supplemented by a French contingent of nine hundred marines and several gunboats.41
The assault began, under the joint leadership of Lord James Elgin and Baron Jean-Baptiste Gros, on Canton in December 1857. After a long bombardment, the attackers scaled the walls and entered the old city in force. They seized Ye Mingchen’s treasury and his archives, and they took him prisoner – he would die in exile. There were 450 Chinese casualties to some 130 French and British. As in the First Opium War, however, taking Canton was not enough to force the emperor to yield. In the spring of 1858 the invading army therefore sailed north and disembarked before Tianjin. In May, outgunning and outmanoeuvring the Chinese artillery, it took the forts guarding the Hai River. The road to the capital stood open. Qing emissaries were dispatched to the scene and, on 3 and 4 July, a treaty was signed, known as the Treaty of Tianjin.
The treaty provided for the opening of embassies in Beijing by Britain and France – as well as by Russia and the United States. When a year later the British and French ambassadors arrived, however, they decided to sail to the capital under guard from a military flotilla. The Chinese objected to the show of force, and a battle ensued in which, for once, the Europeans were bested. The Qing caught the enemy marines in a crossfire, inflicting more than 1,000 casualties. Elgin and Gros were sent out on a second invasion, this time with a much larger force of 7,500 men on the French side and as many as 13,000 British troops. In July–August 1860 a revenge assault was launched on the Hai River forts, leading to another bloody battle won by superior artillery power. Tianjin was occupied and negotiations opened once again.
In a final theatrical action that September, the Qing forces captured 39 of the European party in a dawn raid, taking them into harsh prison conditions in Beijing. This was the prompt for a final advance, taking the British and French through fields, suburban gardens and imperial tombs to the capital’s northern edge. After a last rout of the Qing cavalry, Beijing came in sight of enemy guns. Eventually it surrendered, though not before the occurrence of the Second Opium War’s most notorious episode: the sack of the summer palace and the destruction of its priceless artefacts by an out-of-control French and British soldiery, in an orgy of looting that lasted several days. The emperor, who was in flight, could do no more than mourn the desecration of his collections and the torching of his favourite residence. His brother was left to negotiate. Multiple treaties were signed in Beijing between 23 and 25 October 1860, confirming the Tianjin terms with a higher indemnity.42
The Treaty of Tianjin, or rather a follow-on conference pursuant to one of its clauses, legalized opium imports. The drug would be subject to a tariff of thirty silver taels per chest, approximately 8 per cent by value.43 The irony is that this would make little difference to the volumes imported, and in the long term would even pave the way for the Indian trade’s decline. Though imports initially continued to expand, eventually domestic cultivation took off as enforcement slackened to nil. Domestic developments opened the floodgates: first as a knock-on effect of the legalization of imports, second as the product of emergency measures taken by the Qing themselves in their struggle against the Taiping.
The Taiping Rebellion had proved right the Qing administration’s fears tying together the social peace, malign foreign influence and political stability. The revolt began at the instigation of a failed mandarin examination candidate named Hong Xiuquan who had half-absorbed Protestant missionary ideas in Canton. His movement, preached amid famine conditions, was a hotchpotch of social and moral reforms, including the communal ownership of property, the segregation of the sexes and the proscription of intoxicants. It quickly grew into an out-of-control military threat. Hong, having linked up with underworld figures, initially established a mountain redoubt in his native southern region of Guangxi. Breaking through surrounding imperial troops, his embryo force marched out in 1851 and, plundering weapons and stores and recruiting the dispossessed everywhere, began slashing its way north. Within barely more than a year, Taiping ranks had swelled to 500,000 and their columns had reached the Yangtze. In 1853 they took the great city of Nanjing. They would plague China for two decades. The Taiping launched raids as far as Beijing itself and in 1860–61, just as the Qing were dealing with the Anglo-French assault, they rampaged through the Yangtze valley to the edges of Shanghai. The Qing took Nanjing back in 1864, but Taiping remnants spread south again towards Canton. Their last forces were defeated only in 1871. Through violence, famine and associated diseases, estimates are that they left 20 million dead.44
The Qing survived, but just barely, and their administration fell under maximum strain. A number of provinces, cut off from Beijing, were forced to fend for themselves. They soon discovered that, if money needed to be raised, opium offered a solution. During 1856–8, before the Treaty of Tianjin still, the Shanghai authorities decided they might as well tax the drug. The rate was set at twelve silver taels per chest. Boats patrolled the harbour, flying flags with the inscription ‘Public Committee for Patriotic Collections’. Duty was collected from local dealers. The procedure radiated such an official atmosphere that the North China Herald told its readers that ‘an Imperial duty upon opium has at least been imposed at this port.’45 The governor in Fuzhou implemented a similar system. The Ningbo authorities did likewise, farming out collection rights to local financiers. In 1858 the city of Xiamen, which had been levying $2 per chest, raised this to $50.46
The expedient that saved the Qing from the Taiping was that they allowed provincial governors to raise their own armies. In the mid-1850s an official named Zeng Guofan set up a Hunan Army on the south bank of the Yangtze. It was he who recovered Nanjing in 1864. Zeng also sponsored the formation of parallel military bodies in neighbouring regions. His troops, however, professionally raised and highly paid, were expensive to train and maintain. They made use of modern weapons bought from the Europeans or manufactured in arsenals set up with their help, and this, too, needed to be paid for. The solution was a new tax: likin. An internal duty levied on goods passing through certain fixed stations – waystations on water and land routes, market towns – likin would notably come to be raised on that highly portable and valuable item: opium.47
Making the best out of a situation that had been forced on it, the Qing state began after the signature of the Treaty of Nanjing to raise significant revenue on the drug. A new tariff was agreed with Britain in 1885, under the Chefoo Convention, setting import duty plus likin at a total of 110 taels per chest, or around $150.48 Within three years, the total tax take from opium would reach 9 million silver taels, or approximately $12.5 million.49 Between 1885 and 1905 opium would bring between 6 and 7 per cent of the annual imperial tax revenues, and as much as 14 per cent in 1906.50
Officially, opium remained a prohibited article: it was only imports that had been legalized. Penalties on possession were lifted in 1859, but sentencing continued to apply on smoking by officials, soldiers and eunuchs. It remained forbidden to open or operate opium dens, and only merchants licensed to deal in foreign goods were theoretically allowed to handle the drug.51 Cases published in the Peking Gazette during the 1870s and ’80s provide examples of the offences prosecuted: an imperial clan member was punished for operating an opium den in Beijing; a Jiangsu magistrate was banished for selling opium; a eunuch was beheaded for smoking opium in the palace and operating a den; a boy was condemned to death by slicing for providing his mother with opium – he had thought she wanted to smoke but she had used it to commit suicide.52
In 1865 the imperial court even issued a fresh ban on cultivation, repeating it three years later.53 Why go through such pretences, however, after the foreigners had forced China to agree to take in imports? In practice, the laws were rarely enforced. The result was that domestic opium, cheaper to produce, began to substitute for the foreign variety. Poppy cultivation had already attracted notice in the 1840s, but was then mostly restricted to tribal settlements in the southwestern provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan.54 During the second half of the century, though this core area remained the largest by acreage, the poppy spread to all Chinese provinces. Statistics were imprecise, but domestically grown opium probably overtook imports sometime in the 1880s.55 These had by then peaked at a level of 83,000 chests. By the early twentieth century the Chinese opium output would swell well beyond these bounds, yielding several hundred thousand chests annually.56
By then, opium’s social trajectory had undergone a full arc, from sailors and migrants to the titled and moneyed classes, and back to the simple cart-pusher. People of every station smoked opium: men and women, urban and rural dwellers. From the riverboat inn and the gentleman’s private smoking-room, opium had found its way into the cultivator’s cottage and to the roadside stop. From the courtesan, the pipe had passed on to the housewife. Women of middle-class families, often confined to the home, had time to spare and space to share, and they escaped their boredom with recreations such as playing chess, tasting tea and now smoking opium.57 (Foot binding may also have contributed to the spread of opium among women. Foot binding was painful, and opium is a sedative.) Labourers of all walks of life took it before or after work. A traveller observed: ‘The men always worked harder after they had smoked, and obviously took a pipe before doing a strenuous job.’58 Sedan-chair bearers, boatmen and porters or ‘coolies’ used it to soothe the strain of their effort or to deal with hunger pangs.
Upper-class smoking remained extensive, all the more so when it ceased to be surreptitious. Among the highest ranks, Grand Secretary Ju Hongji and Imperial Censor-in-Chief Lu Baozhong were known to be big smokers. So were the governors of Jiangsu, Chen Qitai, and of Kaifeng, Wen Ti. The boy genius Jiang Jianren sold his literary works for opium, and the artist Ren Bonian did likewise with his paintings. Liu Kunyi, governor general of Guangdong and Guangxi and as such the successor to Deng Tingzhen and Lin Zexu, smoked opium ‘as frequently as others ate rice’. An associate wrote: ‘Liu’s capacity to smoke is unusual . . . Every morning, his servants would prepare about ten mouthfuls of opium paste . . . Then they would wake him up. He would continuously suck about ten mouthfuls before he started to wash and eat breakfast, then he worked. He would not smoke until the evening. After dinner and dessert he would smoke until the early hours of the morning.’59
Good-quality opium came to be aged as a syrup in ceramic or clay jars, triggering a process of fermentation. In Shanghai, the better opium houses seasoned their opium for three years in porcelain jars inscribed with the auspicious characters for longevity, good fortune or happiness. Matured high-quality Bengal was prized much as rare wine vintages were in Europe. Opium of a good season and vintage, twenty or twenty-five years old, could command soaring prices.60 Conversely, at the lower end, consumers were given dross recycled from ashes, sometimes mixed into paste to make it smoother – dross may have accounted for a third of the opium smoked by weight during the second half of the nineteenth century. There were numerous product classes, tailored to popular demand and priced based on market segmentation:
Opium from Yunnan, for instance, was turned into four varieties before being transported to the markets. ‘Horseshit’ was made of raw opium from the southeast of Yunnan; blackish and wrapped in bamboo leaves, it had the distinct appearance of horse manure [though] it was considered the best of all domestic opium and was custom-made for the Guangdong market. ‘Buns’ came second, consisting of raw opium from the west of Yunnan. Wrapped into characteristic oil paper, ‘bun opium’ was mainly sold in Sichuan, Hubei and Shanghai. ‘Opium cakes’ resembled home-baked cakes and were dark in colour. This third type reached its target markets of Guangdong, Hunan and Guangxi and retailed in bamboo containers padded with bamboo leaves. The most affordable category was ‘brick opium’, red or yellow, wrapped into rough paper and particularly popular in Hubei and Guangxi.61
The opium den, finally, became the symbol of the drug’s ubiquitous progress. Whether a humble shop with a few beds catering to men of the lower orders or an opulent hall sporting the best furniture and accessories and passing on its dross for reuse, the den became the proof that the drug had conquered China. In Chongqing, a city of 120,000, there were thought to be 1,230 dens in 1878.62 The newspaper Shen Bao counted more than 1,700 of them in Shanghai in 1872.63 The ethnographer Justus Doolittle wrote that in Fuzhou there were ‘several thousand’ and that the locals described them as being ‘more numerous than rice shops’.64 An activist reported of Hunan province: ‘There are about 1,000 opium dens in the cities and towns near here, irrespective of the private arrangements provided in places of business and guest halls, and he thinks the average number who visit each of these dens daily would be 30.’65
Opium bestrode China like a fifth horseman of the apocalypse. The plague had overrun the country. Opium was everywhere, and it held its elites and populace alike in a perpetual smoke-induced stupor. Or did it? Such, increasingly, was the stereotype, but was it accurate? Shanghai was China’s main platform of opium commerce and consumption, and it was not representative of the rest of the country. Fuzhou was another treaty port and transit point. Foreign observers were more likely to find opium dens in the conspicuous locations where they landed. Activists wishing to rouse opinions against the drug, whether Chinese or foreign, had a motive to exaggerate its spread. By contrast, some travellers, even though they made detailed notes on Chinese social customs, failed to find opium even worthy of mention.66
Opium enjoyed a certain level of acceptability, no doubt. It had come to be served in certain social settings. Opium might be deployed on a festive occasion. Younger people smoked to imitate their peers, or to see if it lived up to its reputation as an aphrodisiac. It might help clinch a business deal, and hosts in commercial settings sometimes offered a welcome smoke to visitors, alongside tea and refreshments.67 A foreign doctor practising in China noted: ‘In the large mercantile hongs, in Swatow, it is becoming more and more the custom . . . to keep the opium pipe for the use of friends and visitors.’68 Another observer remarked that Chinese doctors themselves expected to be invited to a smoke at the houses of their patients, and that even policemen and constables partook of the pleasure.69
At the same time, enough people evidently feared addiction sufficiently to ensure they steered clear of the drug. One indicator is the prevalence of anti-opium cures, whose popularity became widespread. The newspaper Shen Bao, for example, ran advertisements for ‘the foreign white powder that helps one quit smoking’. There were ‘white pearls’ and ‘red pearls’, smokeable from a short pipe.70 Remedies such as astringents, tonics and camphor pills, or withdrawal aids including strychnine, quinine, capsicum and gentian, were eagerly sought.71 Popular brands in the 1900s included the ‘Resurrection pill’, ‘Awakening China anti-opium pill’, ‘Heaven-made cure’, ‘Universal salvation’, ‘Benefit of Heaven’ and ‘Race-protecting pill’.72 One problem was that many of these cures actually contained opium. Missionaries sometimes unknowingly dispensed them in the refuges they ran, and the pills became known as ‘Jesus opium’, much to the horror of those who had given them out.73
Transcripts of court cases tell of parents brawling with local addicts who were trying to lead their sons into opium use.74 Opium was rarely given to children – even to quieten them when they cried, as was done, for example, in Britain.75 Manual workers may have taken the odd pipe to help them through the day, but examples abound of light use kept prudently short of addictive behaviour. As to the wealthy, ‘the opium habit is universally regarded by the Chinese as injurious and degrading,’ wrote a social commentator, even as he noticed ‘some discrepancy between their precepts and practice’.76 Contemporary novels and guidebooks testify to the same ambivalence. In certain settings, opium remained a mark of fine taste, but beyond certain levels of use it was frowned upon. The drug remained a glamorous product, but only if consumed in socially acceptable ways. There was a polarity between those who should smoke – especially the rich and educated, who could afford and appreciate opium – and those who should not: the poor, who faced destitution if they became dependent, and anyone who did not have the strength of will or self-knowledge to smoke it in the right way.77
The main objection, however, to the claim that opium had become ubiquitous in turn-of-the-century China is in the data. The volumes were large, but they do not support the vision of an entire nation lying stupefied.
How many people took opium, on how many days a week and in what quantity is not knowable exactly. What is known approximately is the total volume of opium consumed in China at the time. Also available are surveys attempting to establish how much various categories of users may have smoked. These have allowed contemporary observers and historians alike to establish probable numbers of opium smokers.78
At its peak in 1905–6, based on official statistics, China’s domestically cultivated opium totalled around 480,000 chests, as the average of a given range.79 To this must be added net imports of 29,000 chests. The number must also be reduced for boiling and adjusted for the recuperation of dross. A plausible end-volume was 414,000 chests, or 25,000 metric tons. Previously, China’s imperial customs service had performed a survey to establish how much opium the average smoker consumed. The tentative answer was 4 grams per day for a ‘beginner’, 11 grams for an ‘average’ smoker, and 33 grams for a ‘heavy’ smoker.80 Dividing the total volume (25,000 mt) by the annualized dose for the average smoker (4 kg, or 8.8 lb) yields a possible number of users: 6.2 million, or 1.4 per cent of the population.
The result is only as good as the data inputs (for a discussion, see Appendix I). The volume of raw opium may have been as high as 613,917 chests. The daily dose of II grams is probably too high, as comparable surveys from other Far Eastern countries suggest. Using the higher total number of chests and a daily dose of 5.5 grams, one obtains a perhaps more realistic number of 15 million smokers, or 3.3 per cent of the population. Such an assessment puts the Chinese opium epidemic at a far from negligible level. At the same time, it is nowhere near impressionistic notions of an entire country held in drug slavery.
What is certain, moreover, is that one cannot have it both ways. Mathematically, the higher the number of opium smokers one assumes, the smaller his or her average use had to be, and therefore the less he or she conformed to the stereotype of the heavy user, the addict. Perhaps there were 50 million opium smokers in 1905 China, but then they cannot each have taken more than a light couple of pipes a day. (There is no set threshold for opium addiction, just as there is no threshold for alcoholism, but 1–2 grams of smoked opium per day is a fraction of what a modern-day opiate addict typically injects.) Conversely, if all smokers are believed to have been hopelessly tied to their drug, then based on the same total volume they can have numbered no more than 2 to 2.5 million, or 0.5 per cent of the population.
In 2015 in the United States an estimated 13 million people abused opiates or synthetic opioids.81 This was 4 per cent of the population, more than the plausible 3.3 per cent for China in 1905–6. Worldwide, according to the most recent UN statistics, a quarter of a billion people use drugs, or also 3.3 per cent of the total population – though this mixes a broad range of drugs, not all comparable to opiates.82 The Chinese opium plague, then, was in all likelihood comparable to the modern American opioid epidemic: acute, but not quite cataclysmic. The lamentable episode that was the Opium Wars has stood in the way of sober analysis. Because the wars did so much, in official Chinese iconography, to shape the country’s fate, it became a commonplace that China was the victim of a drug apocalypse.83 This, though not entirely without basis, is inaccurate.
A tragic feature of the modern American opioid epidemic has been the number of deaths by overdose: on average 40,000 per year between 2014 and 2018.84 It is unlikely that opium produced the same casualty rate in turn-of-the-century China. Smoked opium, much less concentrated than heroin or prescription opioids, is less prone to induce overdosing. The social nature of smoking, practised mostly in shops or dens, moreover, defended against secretive, addictive behaviours. The evidence is widespread of casual use unlikely to have led to dependence. The manager of a tannery in Shanghai employing three hundred men, for example, reported that though many were opium smokers, none was ever incapacitated for work.85 The manual worker who took opium to help take him through the strain can only have smoked so many pipes without becoming inapt to his job, and so can the businessman who treated his clients to a smoke.
At the same time, it is clear that a sizeable proportion became addicted. The same tannery manager said of a business relation: ‘All the merchants that I spoke to and knew intimately, agreed that there was no straighter broker than Fong-kee. I said to him “why for smoke so much opium; your teeth are black?” His face was so wasted that you might almost have made your hands meet in the hollow of his cheeks . . . He told me: “Suppose I do not smoke one day, I must die.”’86 The missionaries who opened opium refuges, treating dependent users, found that it was not an easy task. Frederick Gough, of the Church Missionary Society in Ningbo, caught his patients lowering baskets through the windows to accomplices who supplied them with opium. When he placed bars on the windows, they were broken and removed. Inside, ‘violent quarrels took place, tempers being irritated by restraint and by the sight of some securing the longed-for drug.’87
It is, moreover, likely that, more than in twenty-first-century America, in China the drug wrought significant damage through its social side effects. An economically exposed and often underfed population, lacking modern safety nets, was always more vulnerable when it came to basic health and family structures. The porter who allocated ten cents every day to his pipe was more likely to go hungry. The farmer who smoked half his harvest might lose his land in a bad year, leaving his dependents destitute. A witness recalls the following scene:
I saw that eight little girls, ranging from seven to twelve years of age, were placed in a cart . . . ‘These children have been bought cheaply in Ta-t’ong Fu [a town in the northern part of Hunan province], by the man you see with them, who is going to sell them at T’ai-ku for a high price.’ . . . By way of explanation he said the people in the north of the province being poorer, the opium habit reduced the victims to extremities more rapidly, and that selling their daughters was one resource to get money in order to procure the drug.88
The Qing had failed to tame opium. Foreign bullying forbade them to do so. Yet their policies, however well-meaning, had also been too ambitious from the start. Opium prohibition swam against a tide of negative demographic, economic and material circumstances pushing the state towards internal decomposition, as the Taiping revolt confirmed. The pre-modern Qing state, for all its tradition of good governance, utterly lacked the means to police something like opium. Its paternalistic tenets proved wrong-footed and even counterproductive. They paid no heed to the juggernaut that was China’s rising opium culture, whatever the malign, supply-side role of the foreign dealers may have been. The paradoxical outcome was that the drug ended up funding resistance against the Taiping and, in part, China’s industrial and military modernization, but only after the damage had been done.
A second consequence was that opium became tied, in China’s emerging national consciousness, to foreign defeat and humiliation. While its drug epidemic looks merely comparable in gravity to latter-day scares, it was the first of its kind. It made an all the deeper impression that it was something new. The shock itself would help the dying Qing state stage one last, surprisingly successful push against the drug. By then, though, opium had acquired a heft and reputation that went far beyond Chinese shores. Indeed, it had been spreading abroad for a while already.
Indian opium had never only been bound for China. Even before the Europeans appeared on the scene, the drug had been a staple of Southeast Asian trade. As, in the seventeenth century, smoking became fashionable, the colonizers had identified opium as a profitable article. Gradually, they began to carry it everywhere on the Indochinese peninsula and in the Indonesian archipelago, where they distributed it via increasingly structured networks.
The Dutch East India Company had been a pioneer. In the mid-seventeenth century it had begun shipping Bengal opium down to the Malabar coast – still in India – having wrested that trade from the Portuguese. In 1642 it obtained a monopoly from the sultan of Palembang, on the island of Sumatra, on the importation of textiles and opium. It also began selling the paste at Batavia, its outpost on Java. Total quantities handled remained modest, a few hundred chests annually by the late eighteenth century, but slowly the company acquired the right – usually by force – to distribute the drug throughout the rest of the island.89 (On Java, opium was mostly consumed as candu, or pure smoking paste, but unlike in China it also continued to be mixed in or soaked into tobacco or maize leaves for rolling into cigars. Some Javanese also ate opium, spiked their coffee with it or mixed it with betel.90)
The Dutch were the first to adopt a distribution model destined to become popular throughout the region: the farm. An opium ‘farm’ was not an agricultural undertaking, and it had nothing to do with growing poppies. Rather, it was a licence to distribute opium within a certain territorial unit, ranging from a district to an entire colonial state. Models varied, but the licence was typically sold for a fee and for a period of one to a few years. The Dutch East India Company handled the opium’s purchase in India and its transportation. On arrival, it sold the product wholesale to a licensee or licensees. Prices were fixed, as sometimes was the volume the ‘farmer’ was expected to purchase.
The farming-out system was inaugurated on Java in 1809. The Dutch divided the island into 22 residencies. In two of these, opium had traditionally been forbidden, and it remained banned under Dutch rule. By 1832 the other twenty all possessed opium farms.91 The number of stores within each farm was set by the administration and stipulated by contract; by 1851 there were more than 2,600 opium shops on the island, though that number fluctuated downwards in the ensuing decades.92 The system was not unique to the drug. The farming out of excise collection, such as on salt or tobacco, in one guise or another was typical of administrations in the Far East, and it had long been practised in Europe itself. The opium franchises would nevertheless turn out to be particularly rich sources of fiscal income.
The British Indian administration adopted the same model within the territories it controlled, closely behind the Dutch. Briefly, the Bengal authorities had flirted with banning the smokeable mixture of opium and betel leaves known as madat.93 In India, though, opium was chiefly eaten. In 1813 the government introduced a farming system. The terms varied across the subcontinent and as time went by, but the government fixed the number of retail shops in each district, where it sold individual or group licences. In the 1890s excise shops totalled just over 10,000, dispensing opium in pill form, as pharmacies in Europe did. The only difference to the Dutch system was that the government also monopolized cultivation and manufacturing.94
British ships and administrators later pushed opium farms further into the region: Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, Sri Lanka, Burma. The regime varied in the detail: in the Straits Settlements and Malaya, dens were restricted to adult Chinese males, though Chinese women and Malays were allowed to consume the drug at home. By the 1900s the opium farm accounted for almost half the fiscal revenues of the Straits Settlements colony.95 In Burma, the first opium farm was introduced in 1826, spreading thereafter as each Burmese kingdom fell. The exception was Upper Burma, where Shan and Kachin tribal populations traditionally grew poppies. There, opium licences were freely granted at a set fee, with sales allowed to ethnic Chinese, Indians, Shan or Kachin, though not to other native Burmese.96
The British example even persuaded the independent Kingdom of Thailand to legalize opium. It will be recalled that Thailand had issued the first recorded ban on the drug, in the fourteenth century. King Rama II renewed this prohibition in 1811. In 1833, when Thailand signed a trade treaty with the United States, this specifically excluded opium. Another interdiction was issued in 1839, with penalties that were strictly enforced. Persistent smuggling from Singapore, however, and the ominous example of the First Opium War convinced King Rama IV that it was more prudent to allow the drug in after all. In 1852 Thailand set up its first opium farm: the farmer, later a government agency, bought the imported product, processed it in a factory and sold it on to licensees.97 From 1893 it also fixed retail prices. There were two main varieties: superior, which was Bengal opium, and lower-grade, which was a mixture of Indian and Chinese opium.98
As this last detail hints, Chinese merchants were also involved in the trade, and they remained active agents within the structures set up by the Europeans. On Java, for example, a hybrid Chinese–Indonesian community dominated commerce, also operating monopolies such as ports or salt production. This community continued to be granted substantial economic power under the Dutch, and its members won all the opium farms.99 There would be Chinese opium farmers in Singapore, Malaya, Thailand, Cambodia and Burma. In Vietnam, where opium remained prohibited, Qing merchants played the role of the smugglers. A Chinese oligarchy controlled most foreign trade, and the authorities found it accordingly difficult to discipline. As the merchants soon noticed, moreover, the Vietnamese tax inspectors did not board visiting junks at the river mouth but in Hanoi itself. The traders got their ships to unload their merchandise downriver, in the countryside, for taking into the interior, just as Jardine Matheson and others did in the Pearl River estuary.100
It was the French, however, who would impose the drug wholesale on the Vietnamese as they gobbled up their kingdoms between 1862 and 1884. No time was lost: as early as 1862, Messrs Ségassié and Télésio became the proud owners, for eighteen months, of the opium farm for Cochin-China – or southern Vietnam. They paid the tidy sum of $91,000 for the privilege, though theirs was not an auspicious start. The company quickly became embroiled in mismanagement and fraud: the Frenchmen asked for a reduction on their licence payment, then it was revealed that they had been skimming profits into their own trading enterprises. The operation was liquidated and the principals were thrown into jail. The next opium farmer was a presumably more honest Chinese merchant named Wangtai.101 France had at the same time imposed an indemnity on the neighbouring kingdom of Annam which it was unable to pay. The kingdom conceded, as a means to raise money, its first opium farm to a private (Chinese) group.102
In Vietnamese Indochina, each region initially remained under a separately run but similar regime: Cochin-China, Annam and Tonkin. Cambodia, which became a French protectorate in 1867, itself established an opium farm shortly before colonization.103 As opium became more embedded in Indochina’s colonial administrative structures, though, the French sought to establish greater uniformity and control. In Tonkin, smuggling remained rife, especially from the adjacent Chinese province of Yunnan. Laos, which became part of French Indochina in 1893, was an opium-growing region in its own right. Both the challenges this represented and the drive to maximize a valuable fiscal resource led to the creation of a new system into which these regions were progressively assimilated. In 1882 France established the first integrated opium monopoly, known as the Régie de l’opium. Originally only an import monopoly, the Régie took over wholesale distribution in 1890 and manufacturing in 1892. From 1895 it began selling individual licences to retailers.104 Importing both Bengal and Yunnan opium, from 1900 it concentrated all manufacturing in Saigon.105
Following the French example, Régie-style integrated monopolies – whereby every link in the chain was government-run except for the last, the individual shop – in turn replaced farming systems in most of the region. In 1893 the Dutch parliament approved the formation of an Opiumregie for Indonesia, rolled out the next year in its first trial residency. All opium affairs were concentrated in Batavia, where a government plant, employing hundreds of workers, churned out products of uniform quality sold in standardized and marked packaging. A Java-wide bureaucracy replaced the farms and sub-farms; it even ran its own network of stores.106 In Burma arrangements for selling licences were altered in 1902–3, with retail now tightly controlled based on fixed margins.107 In Thailand the royal government instituted an Opium Régie in 1907.108 In Sri Lanka a centrally run system was put in place in 1909.109 In Singapore and most of British Malaya, a government-run monopoly replaced the old farms in 1910–11.110
With the exception of the Straits Settlements and Malaya, per capita consumption of processed opium remained, in all of these territories, well below Chinese levels. On Java, by 1900, it had flattened at just above 1 gram per annum. On Sri Lanka this was 2 grams. In Burma as in French Indochina, official consumption was just under 6 grams (though this ignored substantial smuggling), and in Thailand 11 grams. China, by comparison, stood at 56 grams.111
In India, the number was around 2.5 grams, less than in Britain itself, where it was above 4 grams. Dr Kailash Chandra Bose of the Calcutta Medical Society testified: ‘Opium does not have any deleterious influences upon the health of habitual consumers. On the contrary, it is a prop to old age, and elderly men pull well under its influences.’112 In India, most consumption was medicinal. The problem, however, was that everywhere else opium was smoked. This, making it impossible to hide beneath the cloak of medical use, exposed the drug and its distribution networks to growing criticism. The Régies themselves had only become popular because the principle of unbridled fiscal profiting from opium was coming under attack.
The Courrier de Saigon wrote in 1864: ‘France has not come to this country to force people to poison themselves. It found opium spread widely already among all classes.’113 While it was still possible to make such patently false statements in the 1860s, around the end of the century it was becoming more difficult.
The colonial administration in The Hague was the first to begin departing from blithely self-serving views. Revisions made to opium farm regulations in 1853, 1874 and 1890 comprised commitments to restrain consumption as well as maintain revenues. From 1853 the Dutch reduced the number of retail outlets in Indonesia, also creating new opium-free enclaves.114 Such initiatives acquired fresh momentum as Charles Te Mechelen, a Eurasian Javanese, became chief inspector of opium affairs. Mechelen was charged in the 1880s with investigating the opium habit. Alongside anti-smuggling measures, he recommended that the government take over manufacturing and deepen its control of the farms, which were reproached for sharp promotional practices and a structural bias towards expanding consumption.115
In the 1880s the MP Willem van Dedem had already attacked the colonial opium administration in the Dutch parliament. Like-minded politicians and administrators criticized the Mechelen report, published in 1888, for not going far enough. Ex-East Indies men such as Pieter Brooshooft, the editor of a Javanese newspaper; Isaac Groneman, a long-time Yogyakarta resident and royal physician; and the activist Elout van Soeterwoude upped the pressure by forming an Anti-opium Bond, comprising newspaper editors, jurists and academics as well as several prominent churchmen and MPS. The bond obtained promises that the new regime, the Opiumregie, would be able to check and, over time, reduce opium’s reach.116
In Burma, likewise, Chief Commissioner Charles Aitchison took on indiscriminate opium sales from 1881. In his opinion, it was one thing to sell opium to ethnic Chinese or Indians, who had a culture of opium consumption (or were, in contemporary racial discourse, constitutionally better equipped to resist the habit), but to push opium on native Burmese people was immoral.117 Restrictions on sales introduced in Upper Burma in 1888 reflected his views. In 1893 they were extended to Lower Burma, where existing users were to register if they wanted to continue receiving supplies.118 In 1907 the Straits Settlements commissioned an inquiry into opium. The inquiry recommended ending the farming system and instituting the monopoly that was established in 1910–11 as well as putting in place a preventive service.119
In other places, local opposition was able to push for tighter controls. In Sri Lanka and in Thailand, as in Burma, the Buddhist interdiction against intoxication was taken seriously. In Sri Lanka public gatherings took place in the 1890s demanding restrictions on opium imports and sales, gathering tens of thousands of signatures. Eventually, the colonial government introduced a monopoly combined with a smoker registration system designed to stop opium use from spreading.120 In Thailand the Opium Régie, when it was established, proclaimed that it had the aim to ‘ultimately suppress the use of opium’, to be accomplished by reducing the number of shops and eventually establishing a registration system for ‘habitual smokers’.121
Alongside Thailand, finally, another independent country had watched the Opium Wars with mounting apprehension: Japan. The Japanese, rather than legalization, had opted for strict prohibition. This fitted both the archipelago’s isolated geography and its almost total absence of an opium-smoking culture. The region around Osaka was the site of poppy cultivation on a small scale, but there was no smuggling, whether by Chinese or European merchants. In the 1840s the shogunate received both Dutch and Chinese accounts of the First Opium War, including the mistaken information that the drug was a forbidden article in Britain itself. The defeat of the Chinese behemoth came as a shock. If opium became an item of trade, it would crack the door open to colonization, the Japanese concluded. In 1855 and 1856, as it inaugurated or upgraded commercial relations with Russia and the Netherlands respectively, Japan was able to incorporate antiopium clauses into its treaties. Its luck was that it was American and not British gunboats that, under Commodore Perry, forced it to open its ports. When in 1858 the United States and Japan signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce, this likewise explicitly forbade the importation of opium, and an accord with Britain replicated the same terms soon thereafter.122
Japan’s first domestic prohibition was enacted in Meiji times, in 1868. Smoking opium was forbidden, and anyone who sold the drug for the purpose or who induced others to smoke risked maximum penalties.123 In 1870 the government introduced regulations on medicinal opium requiring druggists and physicians to report sales to the authorities. This was followed by legislation dated 1878 allowing the Sanitary Bureau to purchase opium on a monopoly basis for pharmaceutical resale. In typical Meiji fashion, this imitated or reinvented conditions observed in European countries such as France and Germany. The bureau processed the raw opium into paste and distributed the output through a network of offices in Japan’s main cities. Pharmacists could only sell the drug on prescription. Between 1880 and 1907, finally, the penal code was rewritten, including penalties for the illicit importation, manufacture, sale, possession and use of opium and smoking paraphernalia. Smokers faced up to three years of penal servitude, and dealers up to ten years.124
China served as a scarecrow, fostering a national consensus that helped sustain what at the time was the strictest regulatory regime. Japanese resolve was nevertheless tested when in 1895 the country acquired Taiwan. The island possessed a large community of opium smokers, estimated at 170,000 or 6–7 per cent of the total population.125 Milking Taiwan through opium farms, as the Europeans were doing with their Asian colonies, was out of the question: the island was to be treated as part of the mother country, and the Taiwanese to become Japanese citizens. At the same time, enforcing sudden and complete prohibition was going to be difficult.
The government ordered a survey of the land and customs, including opium use. Goto Shinpei, the head of civilian affairs in the Taiwan governorate and as such the official in charge of assimilation, proposed pursuing gradual suppression by means of a monopoly. The Régies recently instituted by European colonial administrations were the right model, he argued. Back home, the Sanitation Bureau objected. An official called upon Japan to ‘proclaim to the world our government’s disinterest in profit’ and ‘follow the path of humanitarianism and righteousness’. Allowing opium smoking to continue even temporarily would sap the ‘racial’ strength of the Taiwanese.126 The chief inspector for the imperial army in Taiwan, Ishiguro Tadanori, responded with a pitch, aired in a series of newspaper editorials, for gradual interdiction. Though he upheld the ideal of a ban, Ishiguro warned that sudden prohibition would cause people to die from the agonies of withdrawal.127
The resulting compromise system was destined to be much emulated. As of 1901 the governor general took over the opium supply. Manufacturing was centralized. A newly set up bureau authorized retail distributors to sell the drug on its behalf. But the bureau also issued permits to users: these permit holders, of a minimum of twenty years of age, required prior vetting by a doctor as ‘habitual smokers’. Without a permit, it was not legally possible to procure opium. The idea was that as smokers quit or died out, their total number would fall over time. Prices were set at a voluntarily low level to discourage smuggling.128
Although contraband no doubt began to make its way onto the island, the Taiwanese regime appeared to be successful. The law was enforced vigorously, with around 2,000 prosecutions every year.129 The bureau aggressively reduced the number of licensed merchants from 3,339 in 1899 to 1,039 in 1907.130 Smoker numbers slowly fell. From around 170,000 officially, they were down to 109,955 in 1909. They would keep falling, to 10,788 in 1938.131 Volumes of opium paste sold onto the retail market declined from 212 metric tons in 1899 to 142 tons in 1907 – on a per capita basis, below the Chinese level.132
A new dynamic was taking hold in the region. The French Indochinese Régie had been little more than a fiscal prop. The Dutch version aimed to put an end to abusive sale practices and limit opium’s progress among the population. In Burma, informed by racial notions associating opium with Chinese ethnicity, the system put in place in the 1880s and ’90s sought to prevent access to Burmese natives. In Taiwan and afterwards in Thailand, opium monopolies explicitly aimed to reduce the number of users, tending towards extinction.
The Taiwanese model would attract the attention of yet another player eager for an influence in the region: the United States. As the Americans took over the Philippines in 1898, they found an opium farm in place, set up by the Spanish authorities in 1843.133 At a loss as to how to deal with their newly acquired population of opium smokers, the American authorities assembled an investigating commission. This commission observed: ‘What has been done during the past eight years by the quick-witted, enterprising nation for the benefit of the [Taiwanese] has resulted in a state of peace such as probably the history of the island has never before known, even temporarily. Not least in the Japanese campaign of progress has been the attempt to grapple with the opium problem and solve it so far as it touches [Taiwanese] life.’134
As the United States became interested in opium and the drug’s East Asian role, it would turn to China, imparting to its policies an even franker prohibitionist twist. Setting the seal on the Opium Wars and their legacy, this would pave the way, tentatively at first but at last durably, for a new international regime. For this to happen, though, a parallel transformation needed to have taken place in Europe and the United States themselves.