Opium (17 page)

It was not long before the culturally and geographically isolated Chinese began to cultivate their own crops of opium poppy, which is not indigenous to China, in the western province of Yunnan.

Thus, by the time the Arab trade in opium was established, China was already originating a home-grown product in addition to importing quantities overland from India, an important point when considering the accusation it was eighteenth-century European traders who started the opium trade: whilst they certainly were to corrupt China with what was called ‘foreign mud', they did not initiate the traffic.

Early Chinese literature contains a number of references to opium. The Chinese surgeon Hua To, living in the period of the Three Kingdoms (
AD
220–264), used opium preparations in addition to cannabis, giving these to his patients prior to major surgery. In
AD
973, the reigning emperor ordered the compilation of a medical book, or herbarium, the
K'ai pao pên tsäo,
in which opium was named as
ying-tsu-su
(
su
being the word for a pod) and recommended as a cure for dysentery. Four fleets set sail for the South Seas in 987, instructed to procure opium amongst other cargoes. At about the same time, opium was fulsomely praised in a poem by Su Tung-P'a. He was clearly familiar with it as more than a medicine, speaking of it as a potion which produced dreams and cured diarrhoea. In the twelfth century, a medical writer recorded how poppy pods were made into a paste then formed into fish-shaped cakes to be sold not only for medical use but for consumption as an expensive delicacy whilst a century later, another writer stated the fish cake paste was used also ‘for diarrhoea and dysentery accompanied by local inflammation; though its effects are quick, great care must be used in taking the medicine for it kills like a knife.' The skill of scoring pods was first mentioned in China in 1488 by Wang Hi, the Governor of Kansu province. In the sixteenth century, in his
The Introduction to Medicine,
Li Ting gave an account of how
a-fu-yong
should be prepared.

The Arab–Chinese trade was comparatively small, only really supporting any shortfall in local production. Opium use was not widespread and was restricted to an upper-class élite who could afford it: most of the population, being semi-literate or illiterate, had not heard of it. Nevertheless, there was one particular section of society outside the élite familiar with opium: concubines of rich men were frequently dosed with it to keep them sexually compliant and subdued to prevent them absconding. The exclusivity of opium, which was eaten, meant very few people were addicted. However, this was to change when a particularly unique new vice, originating in the New World, was introduced to China by European sailors. It was smoking.

After the colonisation of North America, tobacco smoking spread rapidly around the world. Portuguese and Dutch sailors introduced the new fad to India, Indo-China, China and Japan. The Spanish imported tobacco from the Philippines into China around 1620, establishing the smoking habit. Had they restricted it to tobacco, matters might not have developed but, in the mid-seventeenth century, in trading posts in Java owned by the Dutch trading firm Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, sailors began smoking tobacco mixed with a pinch of opium and arsenic to give it a kick, originally believing that smoking an opium-tobacco mixture prevented malaria. The Dutch had been exporting opium from India since 1659, trading it for pepper and using it to suborn Indonesian tribal leaders. It was less than a decade before this tobacco-based smoking cocktail reached the coastal ports of China, carried via Formosa by the Dutch. In China, tobacco smoking had become so popular the Emperor Tsung Cheng prohibited it. The edict was not in force for long but by the time it was rescinded the damage was done. The prohibition had resulted in the Chinese, bereft of tobacco, smoking opium instead.

Thus was born one of the most evil cultural exchanges in history – opium from the Middle East met the native American Indian pipe.

The great social chronicler and reformer, Joseph Rowntree, summed the situation up in 1905 when he wrote:

… it is quite clear that opium had long been known in China as a medicine, and that the poppy had been used there, as it is in India, as a vegetable. It is probable that there grew up in some districts a demand for the drug for vicious purposes also. But it is practically certain, from the absence of all mention of any opium habit by the Jesuit missionaries, by travellers, and in the Chinese records, that there was no general consumption of opium before the introduction of opium smoking.

Although opium smoked by itself had been known in Java in the seventeenth century, the first report of opium smoking was written in the middle of the eighteenth century when a Chinese Imperial official, Huang Yu-pu, was sent from Peking to study conditions on the island of Formosa. He reported:

Opium for smoking is prepared by mixing hemp and the grass cloth plant with opium, then cutting them up small. The mixture is boiled with water, and the preparation mixed with tobacco. A bamboo tube is also provided, the end of which is filled with coir fibres. Many persons collect the opium to smoke it mixed with tobacco alone. Those who make it their sole business to prepare opium in this way are known as opium tavern-keepers. Those who smoke once or twice form a habit which cannot be broken. The aborigines smoke it as an aid to vice. The limbs grow thin and appear to be wasting away; the internal organs collapse. The smoker, unless he be killed, will not cease smoking.

As well as being smoked neat, opium also continued to be smoked with tobacco. In 1816, Dr Abel Clarke wrote:

No opium is exposed in the shops probably because it is a contraband article, but it is used with tobacco in all parts of the Empire. The Chinese, indeed, consider the smoking of opium as one of the greatest luxuries; and if they are temperate in drinking, they are often excessive in the use of this drug. They have more than one method of smoking it: sometimes they envelop a piece of solid gum in tobacco and smoke it from a pipe with a very small bowl, and sometimes they steep fine tobacco in a strong solution of it, and use it in the same way.

The vice of opium smoking, so often associated with the Chinese, was not therefore a native practice. It was indubitably introduced by Westerners.

The Arabs had arrived in China by sailing the coasts of India and Indo-China: the first European allegedly to reach China, in the thirteenth century, was Marco Polo who travelled on the caravan routes north of Tibet. However, by the fifteenth century, these land routes had become unsafe and Europeans traders, who had come to supplant the Arabs, sought a sea passage to China which was considered not only treasure-filled but rich in unparalleled trading possibilities.

Of these new mercantile nations, the Portuguese were the first to arrive. After an abortive attempt to gain a foothold in 1514, in what is now Hong Kong, they were given permission to establish a single but exclusive trading base on the western shore of the Pearl River estuary in 1557. It was named Macau.

The first non-Arabic opium to be imported into China came from the Portuguese settlement of Goa, on the west coast of India, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Known as Malwa opium and originating from the independent Maratha states of central and western India, it was not long before the trade was being competed for by the Dutch and, subsequently, the British, the control of opium passing from one seafaring nation to another. The Dutch took over from the Portuguese, bringing raw opium from India to Java, then re-exporting it to China. When, in the eighteenth century, the British superseded the Dutch, a new phase in the history of opium was opened.

Late in the seventeenth century, the Emperor K'ang Hsi grew fascinated by Jesuit missionaries who arrived at his court. Although mistrustful of his Western vassals, as he considered them – the Chinese believed all the world, known and unknown, was their empire – he decided there might be some way to make a profit from them so, in 1685, he opened the port of Canton (today known as Guangzhou) to traders. Playing safe, he issued strict regulations designed to keep them subservient. From 1720, the foreigners lived and worked in factories to the south-west of the city, outside its walls, in an area which became known as the Canton Colony. They were not factories in the modern sense (that is, places of manufacture) but trading centres staffed by a factor, or manager. Fifteen years later trading vessels, at first obliged to register their arrival in Macau, were allowed to bypass it and sail directly for Canton. From that day on, Portuguese influence began to decline.

For a century and a half, trade with China was governed by the Eight Regulations, the most important of which was that no warships or arms might enter the Pearl River (at the mouth of which stood Canton) and that merchant ships might not approach nearer the city than Whampoa, an unpleasant island with no naturally defined harbour about 10 nautical miles downriver. Malaria was endemic there and fresh water hard to obtain, the only supply being brought out to ships at anchor by sampan. All social and mercantile contact could only be effected through the Co-Hong (frequently abbreviated to just Hong), a cartel of eight to twelve Chinese merchants with exclusive trading rights with the Barbarians, as foreigners were known. Other regulations were primarily designed to humiliate and segregate foreigners.

The Co-Hong merchants obtained their trading right exclusivity from the
hoppo,
a mandarin who, in the way of the Chinese imperial civil service, was unsalaried but earned magnificent sums from the charges he made for the Co-Hong operating licences, by demanding
kum-shaw
(basically gifts which were veiled bribes), setting up spurious social trust funds and exacting fines on the Co-Hong merchants for transgressions made by the foreigners for whom they were responsible. The cost of a licence was around £50,000, excluding the obligatory bribery. The
hoppo,
in turn, had to pay back-handers to his seniors, the local viceroy and governor. The Co-Hong merchants were also on to a good thing. They maintained substantial households and lived in extreme luxury. Howqua, whose real name was Wu Bing-jian and who was one of the chief merchants in the 1830s, was worth in excess of £5 million on his death.

Despite the strictures of the Eight Regulations, trade greatly increased throughout the eighteenth century. Indeed, once the trading structure was organised to the approval of the Chinese authorities, trade flourished. Exports from China included tea, sugar, silk, mother-of-pearl, paper, camphor, cassia, copper and alum, gold and silver, silk piece-goods, lacquerware, rhubarb, various oils, bamboo and porcelain. In return, the Barbarians imported cotton and woollen piece-goods, raw cotton, iron, tin and lead, carnelian and diamonds, pepper, betel-nuts, pearls, watches and clocks, coral and amber beads, birds' nests and sharks' fins (for soup) and foodstuffs such as fish and rice. And opium.

The opium trade would not have established itself had the Chinese been more open to European merchants. With a high demand for Western manufactured goods, traders would have been satisfied and not felt obliged to commence a traffic in opium to boost their profit margins: but this was not to be. The emperors were afraid to lower their defences or to mitigate their jingoistic stance. There was a fear in imperial circles that foreign culture, ideology, religion and mores would infect the Celestial Kingdom. In part, the emperors were right: foreign influence would have had a huge cultural impact upon areas where it was allowed, but they were naïve in assuming they could keep out expansionist traders by merely restricting trade and holding it at arm's length on a noxious mud-flat thousands of miles from the capital. In other words, they underestimated the Barbarians' tenacity, determination and greed.

From the start, opium was the only import the Chinese really wanted. Indian opium was far superior in quality to the homegrown product and better for smoking. Yet more was to come for, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the British-owned and controlled East India Company – founded in 1600 and granted a monopoly of trade with countries ‘beyond the Cape of Good Hope or the Magellan Straits' – was to start to import opium.

The East India Company – frequently nicknamed the John Company after the jovial image of the jolly Englishman John Bull – was not new to China. It had been rashly permitted by the Portuguese to establish a Macau office in 1664, from which it began trading in a small way from 1678. However, once it established mastery of trade with China, it tried to keep a firm grip on it – no British ship could officially trade with China except under an East India Company licence – until 1833 when the company charter lapsed: it did not finally wind up until 1857, when it was dissolved following the Indian Mutiny.

Inevitably, as the availability of opium rose so did the demand for it. The Chinese authorities were quick to recognise its potential harm. An edict of 1729, issued by the Emperor Yung Cheng, prohibited the smoking of opium and its domestic sale except under licence as a medicine. The severity of the penalties for opium usage imply it was a serious problem. Owners of illegal supplies were sentenced to up to 100 strokes of a bamboo cane, with an added punishment of some days or even weeks in a cangue, a heavy yoke-like wooden collar which acted as an unanchored pillory. A fixed, cage-like version was also used: few survived it. Opium dealers and den- or shopkeepers selling the drug were strangled whilst their employees were given 100 strokes of bamboo, three months imprisonment, then exile to a distance of 1000 miles. Carriers, knowing neighbours or officials who engaged in opium trafficking were similarly punished. Local customs officials were penalised for carelessness. Imperial anger was mainly directed against those who profited financially at the expense of those to whom they sold opium. The final clause of the edict expressly exempted the smoker from punishment.