Milk of Paradise

by Lucy Inglis

  In April 1621, the Dutch were weary of sharing what they saw as their territory, and wary of England’s conniving overtures to Spain, so they arrived in the Banda Islands with a group of Japanese mercenaries, and over the course of the summer, slaughtered, enslaved or banished 13,000 people, 90 per cent of the native population. They also built an impressive fort. The Dutch stranglehold on some of the most valuable commodities in the world – nutmeg and mace – had begun, but the manner in which it was achieved did not go unnoticed. The Dutch use of force even shocked the English merchants, one of whom recorded in a handbook intended for colleagues working in the East Indies that ‘it may be seen at what an Expense of Blood and Money the Company have secured to themselves this Branch of Business’.25

  The English attempted, unconvincingly, to support this victory of their supposed allies, but the EIC were keeping one eye firmly on mare liberum, and any opportunity to widen their Asia business. Trading with the Dutch was too expensive, and the way the EIC was funded meant that cash was often in short supply. Over the following years they made trade deals with Spain that allowed them to visit and trade in Spanish-controlled ports, much to the disgust of the Dutch. Finally, in 1666, the VOC representatives on Banda received news of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and promptly made war on the EIC’s single small fort on Nailaka. It was handed over immediately in return for safe passage. The EIC was cast afloat on the free seas, but it had lost the spice trade for good. Something else was going to have to take its place.

  Chinese lore dates the start of tea-drinking to 2737 BC, when Chinese emperor Shen Nung was boiling water to drink, and leaves from the nearby Camellia sinensis tree fell into the water. Inhaling the fragrant aroma, Shen Nung drank the infusion, and a noble tradition was born.

  In reality, tea was probably first cultivated around the Yangtze River in about AD 350, and then spread through Yunnan province. The Tang dynasty (618–907) promoted tea culture over alcohol as a civilizing force. By the time Lu Yu wrote Ch’a Ching (The Classic of Tea) in the eighth century, it was a staple of Chinese daily life. An attempt to tax it, in 780, the year of the Ch’a Ching’s publication, resulted in public outrage. Lu Yu’s complicated explanations of the importance of tea to the Chinese, and the rituals that accompany it, formed the foundations for the highly structured and deeply significant Japanese tea ceremony.

  The Mongols are not remembered for their love of tea, but rather their love of fermented mare’s milk, which Marco Polo compared to decent white wine, but the higher-status Mongols were consumers of strong black Pu’erh tea, which they used as a digestive aid after eating their fatty meat diet. They liked it so much they were willing to trade it for their prized ponies, so desperately needed in China to keep the communications routes running. Tea meant for trade in this way was pressed into hard black bricks for ease of transport and regulation of trading, and the Department of Ministry and Horses was established to oversee it. A pecul (133.3 pounds) of tea was exchanged for the best horses. As the first Europeans began to visit China, it is surprising that tea took as long as it did to make its way to the West, and it was Giovanni Battista Ramusio, the Venetian writer and geographer, in his introduction to yet another version of Marco Polo’s Travels in 1559, who made the first mention of tea in Europe. The Persian merchant Haji Mahomed had told him of how the Chinese ‘take of that herb whether dry or fresh, and boil it well in water. One or two cups of this decoction taken on an empty stomach removed fever, head-ache, stomach-ache, pain in the side or in the joints, and it should be taken as hot as you can bear it.’26 Tea’s medicinal properties were almost miraculous, according to many accounts, which explains its habitual consumption at all times of the day by the peoples who adopted it: ‘The Persians, Indians, Chinese, and Japanese assign thereto such extraordinary qualities, that imagining it alone able to keep a man in constant health, they are sure to treat such as come to visit them with this Drink at all hours.’27

  Coffee, although well known throughout Ethiopia and the Arabian peninsula, particularly Yemen, had only reached the sultan’s court at Istanbul in 1555, where it had been adopted with relish. It is likely that coffee and tea trading with Europe began at about the same time; they were just adopted differently by different countries.

  By the time of the European Renaissance, tea culture was deeply embedded in all levels of Chinese society. Augustinian missionary Martin de Rada described in 1575 how esteemed guests were greeted with a ceremony where the tea was served with a morsel of sweet conserve, presumably fruit, put into the bottom of the cup and eaten when it had soaked up the flavour, then washed down with the tea. Although he enjoyed the sweet, ‘we did not care much for that hot boiled water, yet we soon became accustomed to it and got to like it, for this is always the first thing that is served on any visit’.28 Lower down the social scale, sedentary workers such as weavers kept a pot and cup next to them as they worked and sipped throughout the day, the pot refreshed by a teaboy with a kettle. Others took tea breaks at stalls or shacks where they could also pick up fruit or a snack, and those with more time went to a teahouse, where they would be served ritually and could choose not only the variety of tea they desired, but the type of water too. Connoisseurs prided themselves on their ability to identify the origins of both. In the teahouses, fruit and sweet delicacies were complimentary. With a rapidly growing urban population, water quality was a serious issue, and there was a thriving industry that specialized in importing waters for tea into towns and cities. This imported water was more expensive than water from local canals or rainwater, which was also specially collected for teahouses. Cheaper teas made with inferior water were flavoured with flowers, such as jasmine, and the green tea so popular today for its antioxidant properties was regarded as fit for only the basest labourer.

  Europeans would certainly have been introduced to these teahouses by their Chinese counterparts, as they functioned as meeting places where sobriety was an important element of the atmosphere. This was a departure for European merchants, who tended to inhabit their warehouses or offices, and then frequent taverns with friends and colleagues. The teahouse was a civilized way to do business, and the model played an important part in the development of European financial centres over the next century.

  Chinese and Japanese tea arrived in Amsterdam with Dutch traders in 1610, and coffee arrived in Venice in 1615. The ritual involved in the preparation of tea, and the paraphernalia required, kept it in a domestic setting initially, where teapots, kettles, caddies and special tables, chairs and cabinets were unveiled for guests before ‘tea and saffron were served together, the tea being hot, sweetened, and covered in a cup to preserve its aroma’.29 The Dutch marketed tea and teawares to their neighbours, but coffee was already becoming popular, and only the Frisians of northern Germany took to tea as the favoured beverage, drinking it strong, sweetened and thickly laced with cream. By 1640, for most of Europe, coffee had prevailed. The famous British love of tea came later. Samuel Pepys, a keen follower of the latest fashions of all kinds in London, had a cup of tea in his office on Tuesday, 25 September 1660: ‘tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before’.30 Tea had appeared in an advertisement in the newspaper Mercurius Politicus two years earlier, on 23 September 1658, when it was announced that ‘The Excellent, and by all Physicians approved, China drink, called by the Chinese, Tcha, and by other nations Tay alias Tee . . . sold at the Sultaness-head, ye Cophee-house in Sweetings Rents, by the Royal Exchange, London.’

  The explanation for this lies in the English political situation of the time, which had been subject to the Puritanical Commonwealth, when luxuries were denounced, so imports such as tea had not received the exposure that came when Charles II was restored to the throne in the year Pepys first tried tea. Coffee, a bitter, sobering and stimulating drink, was an acceptable and worthy beverage for the City of London’s serious merchants, but tea, with its dab of sugar in place of conserve, still smacked of the exotic. In the late seventeenth century, middle-class Engl
ish women took to tea, its ritual trappings, and all things chinoise, with alacrity.

  Thus, in just those few decades to the 1640s, international exploration and trade had changed the world forever. Goods and habits that had been local became international, and the movement of people accelerated from a trickle to a surge. Even plants suddenly began to move across these maritime trade routes, and tobacco is a prime example of this botanical imperialism.

  Spain and Portugal, united under one king between 1580 and 1640, filled their galleons with as much South American bullion as possible. In Spain, the counting house in Seville was receiving hundreds of cartloads of ‘silver, gold and precious pearls’ in a matter of weeks, to the point where it ‘could not accommodate it all and it overflowed onto the patio’.31 They were also embarking on a different kind of Triangular Trade, the slave trade of the West Indies, which was so lucrative it made them the dominant world power in just a couple of decades. With this money, they fuelled trade across the seas, and they were particularly interested in strengthening their bases in Indonesia and China, bringing with them a whole host of new and exotic goods to trade, including people, medicines and tobacco.

  The Spanish are the most likely to have introduced tobacco to Indonesia, bringing it from Mexico to the Philippines in 1575.32 Archaeological finds of clay pipes on the Guangxi coast of China, bordering Vietnam, date from at least the mid fifteenth century onwards, so this documented date is probably somewhat late.33

  When the Dutch reached Java, they observed the persistent native habit of betel-chewing, used as a social interaction and a mild stimulant, as well as an appetite suppressant. For many labourers, it was little more than a quid of areca and lime wrapped in betel leaves, chewed at all hours of the day, allegedly to clean the teeth and freshen the breath. Despite the red-stained mouth and copious spittle that appalled the new European arrivals, betel was not simply a lower-class habit. In all but the very poorest houses, complicated equipment, referred to as a betel-set, was brought out and placed in the centre of the room when guests arrived, and a mark of social status was to have a betel-servant to accompany the man of the house when he went out on business. The endemic chewing of betel mixed with areca and lime demonstrates that Indonesia was a ready market for a new mild narcotic such as tobacco.34

  Europeans introduced not only the finished tobacco product, which they smoked in long reed or clay pipes, but also plants or seeds. Java and the Philippines both had excellent climates for tobacco and it soon flourished, with the Dutch sailors readily taking up pipe-smoking in what had become Batavia in 1619. The early Portuguese in the East remained convinced of the benefits of snuff, and many Chinese mandarins adopted the habit in the seventeenth century, carrying it in elaborately carved jade and ivory bottles, but the Dutch were hardened smokers of tobacco. Chinese traders took a liking to smoking and introduced the practice to mainland China through their trading contact in Taiwan, and the author Yao Lu writes of tobacco farming flourishing in Fujian in his book Lushu, written in 1611.35

  The Chinese love of tobacco spread rapidly, with the Manchus of the north and north-east becoming particularly heavy users, and the state stepped in to halt what they saw as a lapse in manners and morals. Unlike the Indonesians, who would chew tobacco by adding it to their betel wrap, the Chinese were keen smokers. This may be linked to the role of incense and smoke in various Chinese religious and cultural rites, particularly the veneration of ancestors, but China rapidly adopted the custom of what they called yancha, or tea and smoke. The rituals of both came to form the core of the Chinese opium smoking experience.

  From 1636, a series of edicts prohibited tobacco smoking, but it was too late and even beatings and ear mutilations could not stop people smoking. When the Ming Empire fell in 1644 and the Qing dynasty began, they were indifferent to whether the populace smoked tobacco or not and the bans were revoked. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the first basic cigarettes appeared.

  The opium habit spread among the ordinary people in south-eastern China at much the same time as tobacco, but China’s working classes had not yet been exposed to it. The existence of the opium poppy and methods of producing opium, or yapian, were recorded by Ming writers in the mid fifteenth century, but it was not until 1589 that it attracted a customs tariff.36 Many of the Dutch in Indonesia added to their pipes a little opium and a pinch of arsenic, the Dutch version of theriac in the humid foreign climate, which was believed to protect against malaria and cholera. These crude recipes burned unevenly in a pipe bowl, and the Javanese – already experts in the elaborate preparation of mild sedatives – were soon making a much more sophisticated product, that came to be known as madak. Opium was mixed with plant roots and hemp, finely minced, boiled with water in copper pans, then dried and mixed with minced tobacco. It burned relatively slowly, but evenly, and imparted a pleasant sense of relief from boredom and anxiety, or xinjiao. It’s unclear whether Yao Lu (d.1622) was smoking tobacco or madak when he described the mechanics of smoking: ‘You light one end and put the other in your mouth. The smoke goes down the throat through the pipe. It can make one tipsy, but it also protects against malaria.’37 Either way, it is most likely that the Dutch introduced madak to China in the early 1620s, through Taiwan merchants, and it may well be that many who smoked it were not aware that madak wasn’t pure tobacco.

  In almost all literature, any new fad or craze in a society is espoused, initially at least, as medicinal. Chinese literature is no exception, and much of the early writing about the anti-malarial properties of madak attributes it to the tobacco content.

  In Europe, James I had already denounced ordinary tobacco-smoking. His treatise of 1604, A counterblaste to tobacco, branded tobacco a ‘filthy noveltie’ that was ‘lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs’. But England too had acquired the tobacco habit, and as perceptive as James was on the damaging effects of smoking, his opinion was dismissed as zealotry. The people were quite convinced of the health benefits of the tobacco pipe, and demand continued to grow. Europeans rarely smoked madak, however, preferring to consume opium in liquids like dwale, or to eat it as pills or pellets.

  Owing to the prevalence of private trade between European and South Sea merchants and China throughout the seventeenth century, it is almost impossible to calculate the true extent of madak and then pure opium use, and it was almost five decades before government documents return to the subject with the capture of Xiamen, or Amoy as it was known, in 1683. Six years earlier, the VOC had organized its holdings in Bengal around opium farming. The company exported it mainly to Java and China, and it was only with the capture of Amoy that the Chinese government realized how widespread the problem of opium smoking had become along the south-eastern coast. The scale of trade between West and East was revealed the same year, when the directors of the EIC wrote to their man in Macao regarding the ‘loss of Bantam to the Dutch, and the “Johanna” outward bound to your place [Amoy] with her stock of £70,000, most bullion’.38 The relative value of this bullion in 2017 is £1–1.4 million.39 The sinking of the Johanna was a significant blow, but bearable for a company trading on the level of EIC. Profits varied, but the 400 per cent made by da Gama on his voyage in 1502–3 was not unusual for ships surviving the trip to the East. The risks were significant: between 1500 and 1634, 28 per cent of all Portuguese ships involved in merchant trading were lost at sea.40

  The capture of Amoy was a turning point in Chinese attitudes to opium, and to the people of the south-east. Opium habits had long been common among China’s wealthier classes, but it was taken in moderation, as part of a regular routine that included exercise, healthy eating and the taking of tonics and medicines. It was also taken inside the home, and often in a separate room which, like the European parlour for taking tea, was equipped with special furniture, smoking paraphernalia and other recreational kit such as a mah-jongg set. Women smoked tobacco and opium too in these domestic settings, and the Siku quanshu, th
e official encyclopaedia of China compiled in the late eighteenth century, recorded that in 1701 ‘From officials to servants and women, everyone smokes today.’41 And it was precisely the ‘everyone’ that was the issue.