Opium (24 page)

In 1870 the Censor, Yew Peh-ch'uan, warned against poppy farming, declaring opium was the greatest national danger to food production. His estimate was that 10,000
mow
(approximately 17,000 acres) were dedicated to poppy cultivation at any one time. The situation markedly deteriorated, as was mentioned in an article in
The Times
of December 1888:

By 1887 the relations between the Chinese and the Indian drug are found to have altogether changed … In all parts of the Empire, except the islands of Formosa and Hainan, it is said to be produced in substantial quantities. It is estimated that a third of [Yunnanese] cultivation is devoted to poppy fields [and] this huge stock of Chinese opium is raised for the supply of scores of millions who never smoked before. Si-chuen [Szechuan province], for instance, contains 70,000,000 of inhabitants. Seven-tenths of the adult male population, it is computed, now are opium-smokers. Probably twenty-five years ago only a fraction had contracted the habit …

The founder of the China Inland Mission and one of the first Englishmen to travel deep into the Chinese interior, Revd J. Hudson Taylor, commented in 1893: ‘When I first reached China [in 1854] the opium habit was comparatively rare, but it has spread very rapidly during the last twenty years, still more rapidly during the last ten; it is frightfully prevalent now.' As he visited ten of the eighteen provinces of China, his comments are an even more terrible indictment of the opium trade.

Until 1890, Chinese poppy cultivation had been unofficial but that year the emperor revoked all the prohibition edicts and Chinese opium was legitimised. The move was not made because of a sudden official change of heart, an acceptance of opium, but as a means of quashing imports. It was a desperate act and it was to do more harm than good for it merely encouraged an even wider use of opium, making it harder than ever to eradicate in the long run.

Meanwhile Hong Kong prospered, remaining a more stable place in which to live than China: much of the nation was in turmoil with the Taiping Rebellion which raged between 1851 and 1864. Despite the risks from civil unrest in China, piracy, occasional typhoons and other natural disasters, substantial profits were made in Hong Kong. By 1892, the colony had a population of a quarter of a million, dealt with 40 per cent of China's trade and had an annual turnover exceeding £20 million.

Economic, religious and political refugees fled to the colony in ever increasing numbers, bringing their opium habit with them. By 1882 the sale of opium, which had gone back to being an annually renewed ‘farm' monopoly in 1858, accounted for one-sixth of colonial revenue. The opium was provided by the farm concessionaire who sold it to divans or dens whilst, at the same time, collecting a tax from it. Smoking took place either in the divans or at home, the drug also being sold on a take-away basis.

As in China, opium crossed all the class barriers in Hong Kong Chinese society, from scholars and merchants to rickshaw pullers and coolies. The wealthy, who tended to smoke in the privacy of their homes, owned their own opium pipes which were expensive and often beautiful works of art fashioned from jade, ivory, tropical hardwoods, silver and even gold. Today, a genuine, top-quality antique pipe costs thousands of dollars for they are rare: when opium was finally banned completely, pipes were confiscated by, or surrendered to, the police and destroyed, creating
objets d'art.
Those who could not afford their own pipe and had no private place in which to indulge their habit frequented the divans or dens where they used pipes provided by operators.

The licensed opium divans, along with the beautiful Oriental whores who occupied the brothels, built an exotic reputation for Hong Kong but this apparent climate of vice was in fact still strictly controlled. To operate a divan, the proprietor had to prove to the chief police magistrate he was a fit and proper person who could furnish ‘suitable accommodation for the use of customers, in order to prevent nuisances or offences to decency.' A divan was obliged by bye-laws to give on to a public thoroughfare and it had to keep to strict opening or licensing hours: the opening times were regulated as being from midday to ten o'clock on Monday to Saturday. In theory, divans were closed on Sundays out of deference to the Christian community. In fact, these restrictions were often ignored by both the authorities and the proprietors. It was impractical to restrict a man's craving to a rigid timetable.

For most of the nineteenth century, opium was smoked but, in 1893, a new phenomenon began to appear, as it had already done in the West – the injection of morphine solution with a hypodermic syringe.

In Hong Kong dens, just as was to happen later in opium shops and pharmacies in Shanghai, opium smokers or coolies buying pills for medicinal purposes were on occasion given a free morphine injection and told they could have another
ex gratia
shot with their next purchase of pills. Once hooked, of course, the injections were charged for, though they were up to a sixth cheaper than smoking.

While the hypodermic syringe was a convenient method of drug taking for European addicts, the syringe had a drawback in the East. With a native ignorance of hygiene, many syringes were rarely cleaned, needles were usually dirty and not disinfected between users and contaminated water was used to make the morphine solutions. The result was a widespread incidence of abscesses, blood poisoning and hepatitis.

The injections were not at first self-administered but given by Chinese doctors whose surgeries were little more than morphine dens. The Hong Kong government analyst, a Mr Crow, visited a doctor's surgery and wrote:

I entered, and observed three men asleep on mats, and about twelve or fifteen standing in the verandah. Some had just had injections; the others were waiting their turn. There were numerous puncture scars on their arms. The quantity used depended on the amount of opium the patients had been in the habit of smoking.

The holder of the opium monopoly at the time was the Hau Fook Company. The directors officially complained to the government, accusing the doctors of an unethical infringement of their monopoly. As the charge for an injection was so low – at 1 cent a shot – they were losing business. The police investigated the matter and discovered eighteen morphine surgeries but the government took no action until 1923 when it set up a dangerous drugs ordinance.

By 1880, opium imports were dropping. Chinese domestic production and sound commercial sense were the main cause, most of the merchant houses diversifying as China opened up to more general trade. Even Jardine Matheson had stopped dealing in opium in 1872. In the 1890s, the trade declined even further because of price rises in India and the improved strength of Chinese opium. Commercial commentators also reckoned, as China reduced her opium imports, she would have more income with which to import a general range of manufactured goods.

Yet there was another, uncommercial reason for giving up the lucrative trade: it was the increasingly vociferous criticism of opium back in Britain. The ‘Saints', as Matheson had sarcastically called them, were blowing their trumpets and calling for justice. Humanitarian interests were merging with commercial selfishness.

Public opinion in Britain against opium had started to gain a voice in the 1870s, spurred on by the devastating effects of the trade in China and upon the native population of India which was such that, at times, the amount consumed in India exceeded the amount exported. It was proving impossible to prevent addiction in the country of manufacture where workers had started to pilfer from the godowns of Patna and Benares to feed an addiction either acquired by illicit eating or by absorption through the skin whilst handling huge quantities of the raw drug.

The move against opium was not restricted to British activists. In 1881, the government of Bombay prevented the government of India from promoting poppy cultivation in its domain on the grounds that it demoralised the work-force. They cited what had happened in the state of Gujarat where crime and corruption had soared after the introduction of poppy farming.

The opium trade had developed purely as a business founded on the basic commercial principles of supply and demand and ready profitability supported by the premise of if-we-don't-sell-it-somebody-else-will. Morality did not come into the equation and only slowly evolved over many decades. There were always a few enlightened observers or critics and, at the time of the opium wars, there were anti-opium organisations but they were short-lived and carried no influence.

For many years, the Earl of Shaftesbury was associated with anti-opium work. In 1843, as Lord Ashley, he had introduced a Parliamentary motion stating the opium trade and monopoly were ‘utterly inconsistent with the honour and duties of a Christian kingdom'; fourteen years later, he raised the opium question in the House of Lords but to little avail. Others were equally condemnatory, even those who saw a good side to opium. A missionary, Revd James Johnstone, although accepting the opium trade had a beneficial side, admitted: ‘I shall have to present such an array of dark facts on the other side that you shall pronounce the whole trade to be a foul blot on the fair name of England, as well as a curse to India, and a deadly wound in the heart of China.'

At last, by the 1870s, British public opinion was roused against the trade. Addressing a meeting in London in 1874, a Chinese speaker against opium, Ng-a-Choy, said:

There cannot be, I think, two opinions about the desirability and necessity of abolishing the opium traffic, because of the pernicious effects produced by the use of opium. The whole nation of China has been demoralised by it. It is a proverb among us that of the four common vices, drunkenness, gambling, fornication and opium smoking, opium smoking is the worst.

A reform movement grew up to fight opium cultivation and trade in the British Empire but, from the start, the reformers knew they were up against the odds. This was poignantly outlined by Sir John Strachey who wrote ‘Next to the land revenue, the most productive source of the public income [in India] is opium.' When it became realised, people were appalled to find 17 to 20 per cent of the gross national product of the Indian subcontinent was entirely due to the demoralisation of millions of Chinese.

In 1874, the Anglo-Oriental Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade was founded in Britain with Shaftesbury as its president and, for a decade, it was extremely active. Its inspiration and funding derived from the Quakers. The man behind the Society was Joseph Grundy Alexander, a prominent Quaker and barrister of unimpeachable integrity. Determined and imperturbable, using a lawyer's dispassionate approach to argument, he was a formidable opponent whom even the opium traders viewed with respect. Appealing on moral and humanitarian grounds to liberal middle-class values, the Society gained a substantial following, also pressing the need for further domestic opium regulation beyond the remit of the 1868 Poisons and Pharmacy Act.

The society aimed at educating public opinion and applying parliamentary pressure to obtain political action. It extensively published anti-opium books, tracts and a magazine called
The Friend of China,
set up local offices throughout Britain, held public meetings, raised money, lobbied and petitioned the House of Commons. In 1882 alone, 489 petitions were presented to Parliament by the society.

These came to little. Every society member knew the only way to eradicate the opium trade was to fundamentally change the financial structure of India. In 1876, Lord Salisbury, then Secretary of State for India, informed an anti-opium delegation that there would be no extension of the opium trade in India but this was as far as the government was prepared to go. Pro-opium lobbyists had more political clout than the do-gooder disruptives.

Businessmen involved in the opium trade were naturally perturbed by the anti-opium movement but they had a powerful ally. The press supported them and government policy. For every 1000 words printed against opium, 5000 words in its favour were published in newspapers and periodicals.

The primary pretexts in favour of the trade were spurious and devious: opium-smoking, it was claimed, was not overtly injurious; the British government had not forced opium upon China, but merely met a demand; the Chinese authorities were insincere in professing the desire to stop opium smoking and the cultivation of opium poppies in China proved it. These facts were backed up by the if-we-don't-others-will thesis and the historical fact that Britain was merely continuing a trade begun by others. It was also frequently aired that if opium was injurious, it was no more so than alcohol was in Britain: indeed, if anything, it was less so for an opium addict was not noisy and belligerent like a drunkard. An American doctor even went so far as to say alcoholics should change to opiates, thereby causing less harm to their health and families.

Typical of pro-opium propaganda was an article from the
Pall Mall Gazette
of 1879. It asked why, if opium smoking was such an evil, no inherited ill effects were visible and went on to state that opium smoking retarded digestion which was beneficial to the Chinese who purportedly ate a virtually vegetarian diet. Opium, it was suggested, was even good for the Chinese who lived on undrained ground and worked in rice paddyfields where fever was endemic. A more outrageous claim stated the Chinese were largely immune to bronchial diseases because the antiseptic qualities of opium smoke protected their lungs.

Not only the popular press sided with opium. In the winter of 1881—2,
The Times
published two letters from Sir George Birdwood who defended the trade, differentiating between eating and smoking opium but assiduously avoiding mention of its addictive potential. He wrote:

I hold it to be absolutely harmless. I do not place it simply in the same category with even tobacco smoking but I mean that opium smoking in itself, is as harmless as smoking willow bark or inhaling the smoke of a peat fire, or vapour of boiling water … I hold opium smoking, in short, to be a strictly harmless indulgence, like any other smoking, and the essence of its pleasure to be not in the opium in itself so much as in the smoking of it. If something else were put into the pipe instead of opium, that something else would gradually become just as popular as opium, although it might not incidentally prove so beneficial … I repeat that, of itself, opium smoking is almost as harmless an indulgence as twiddling the thumbs and other silly-looking methods for concentrating the jaded mind.