Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  Yang is not an exceptional figure in the history of the dynasty. One of many competent officials who rose to the vice-ministerial level and no higher, he makes no appearance in the standard histories of the period. But he has come to the attention of a few historians because of a collection of short anecdotes he compiled about life in the capital in the closing decade of the Ming. He finished the manuscript of Collected Writings from Jade Hall in 1643. It was not a great year to publish a book. A massive epidemic had just swept through north China the previous year, and a year later rebels would overrun the capital and topple the dynasty. This is why the book is now extremely rare. Yang did not know that the Ming would fall, but he knew the realm was troubled. His book, he tells us in his preface, was to remind people of what life in the capital was like when times were still good.

  In an essay that appears in the first part of Collected Writings from Jade Hall, Yang observes that Beijing people in the past decade had experienced two minor changes. They were changes you could see “on every street corner,” as he puts it, and they were signs that all was not well. The first was that peddlers were selling wild sand grouse. Sand grouse did not belong in the Beijing area. Their natural habitat was farther north along the southern edge of the Gobi Desert. According to local lore, these birds flew this far south only when military maneuvers on the northern border disturbed their habitat. Yang was told that sand grouse had started appearing in Beijing in 1632. Enterprising bird catchers were now catching them and selling them to cook for dinner. The arrival of sand grouse in Beijing could have been a sign of a change in the weather, for 1632 was a wet year and the rains might have had something to do with driving them south. But their presence was regarded locally as evidence of trouble on the northern border, where the Manchus were massing for an invasion. The sand grouse were the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. No one could actually say this, since even to mention the possibility of invasion was enough to be accused of treason as a fifth columnist. But everyone understood that that was what the availability of sand grouse really meant.

  The second street-corner sign that the world was topsy-turvy was the appearance of tobacconists. In the year Yang was born, 1597, no one in his home province of Shandong, south of Beijing, had tasted tobacco. Few were the Chinese anywhere who had. There were smokers on the southeast coast, and the leaf had found its way to Beijing, where it appears in a list of county office purchases from 1596 (at a price twice what cinnamon or sulphur cost on the Beijing market, and seven times higher than jasmine tea). By the time Yang arrived in Beijing to take his exams in 1631, the taking of “smoke liquor,” as some called it, was well established in the capital. Yang dates tobacco’s arrival in Beijing to the reign of Emperor Tianqi, who was enthroned in 1621 and died six years later. Beijing farmers, he writes, have been cultivating tobacco for “the last twenty years.”

  Yang felt that he had to account for the strange plant being in Beijing. He starts his explanation by noting that smoking was unknown in ancient China, there being no references to it in the classics. It must have come from abroad. As the main smokers in the capital region were soldiers who had been moved north to defend the border against the Manchus, Yang suspected a southern origin. The soldiers’ demand had induced local farmers to convert their fields to tobacco patches, and they were earning ten times what they could get by growing grain. With all that tobacco about, Beijing residents started picking up the habit. The shift eventually caught the attention of Emperor Chongzhen. He was unhappy that farmers were abandoning grain in favor of tobacco, fearing what this might do to food supplies in the capital region, so in 1639 he decreed that anyone caught selling tobacco in the capital would be decapitated. The official explanation was that tobacco was a waste of time, health, and money, but local people—and here Yang tells us something that official history would not record—thought the ban was an overreaction to a pun.

  The standard expression at the time for smoking was chi yan, “eating smoke.” (Today it is chou yan, “sucking smoke.”) The trouble was, the phrase chi yan was homophonous with the phrase “eating the capital.” Yan was smoke, but Yan, written with a different character, was the ancient name of the Beijing region. Eating Beijing was just what Manchu warriors and peasant rebels at that very moment were threatening to do. Merely to speak of smoking could thus be regarded as rumormongering by fifth columnists intent on destroying the dynasty. Had Yang known the Manchus were keen smokers before northern Chinese ever took up the habit, it would only have bolstered the case against smoking.

  The first known case to test the new prohibition came to the Beijing courts the year after the ban was imposed, in 1640. A student from the southeastern coastal province of Fujian came that year to Beijing to take the national examinations with a servant in tow. The servant, presumably to help his master make ends meet while he was away from home, sold some of the tobacco they had brought north with them on the street, and was soon arrested. The sentence was automatically set at decapitation. The sentence went up for review to Emperor Chongzhen, and he confirmed the judgment, making the poor man the first victim of the harsh new law. The penalty was hugely unpopular with the people of Beijing. It took the military governor general of the region two years to get the ban lifted in early 1642. When Yang returned to the capital that year after a brief absence, tobacco was selling in greater volume than ever, and what had been an exotic custom was considered strange no longer.

  The governor general was only being sensible. Servants from Fujian were of no interest to him, but soldiers were, and soldiers liked to smoke. They believed smoking helped them ward off the cold and damp. Why damage their morale by taking this prophylactic away from them? The rumor still persisted that the court had imposed the ban for fear of sedition, but that was because residents of the capital had reason to feel threatened by the larger forces of rebellion, invasion, and epidemic. Being the newest new thing, tobacco was somehow implicated in changes with which most felt they could not cope. As indeed it was, though not quite in the way the people of Beijing thought. To see the bigger picture, we have to look at the globe.

  THINK AGAIN OF THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY world as Indra’s net, but one that, like a spiderweb, was growing larger all the time, sending out new threads at each knot, attaching itself to new points whenever these came into reach, connecting laterally left and right, each new stringing of a thread repeated over and over again. As the density of strands increased, the web became ever more extended, more tangled and complex, yet ever more connective. There were many spinners on this web, and many centers, and the web they made did not extend symmetrically to all places. Some places were favored more than others because of where they were and what was made there or brought to them. Other places tried to stay off the web by building fortifications and imposing regulations to isolate themselves. Still, the spider-web grew and ramified wherever people moved, conquered, or traded—as they were doing during the first half of the seventeenth century at a faster pace and in greater numbers than ever before.

  Along the threads ran all manner of people and goods, boats and carts, warriors and weapons. So too ran a lot of other things: animals and plants, pathogens and seeds, words and ideas. Movement along the web was not ordered according to anyone’s wishes, but it was never random, for the only way things like plants or ideas could move was by traveling in the company of those who moved, and those who moved did so in relation to needs and fears that followed patterns—even if where they ended up wasn’t where they wanted to go. Many things were swept along in the movements of people who traveled across the globe without anyone intending that this should happen, remaking the world in ways no one thought possible. American members of the nightshade family—the tomato, the potato, the hot pepper, tobacco—would all travel globally in just this way.

  Christopher Columbus and his crew in 1492 were the first non-Americans to see indigenous people of the Americas smoke, though Amerigo Vespucci gets the credit for making the first reference to tobacco in p
rint, in 1505. Jacques Cartier tasted tobacco in 1535 on his second journey to the New World. The smoke felt hot in his mouth. The only analogy he could create to describe the sensation to his readers, who had no idea what it was like, was to compare it to pepper—which happens to belong to the same family. Champlain observed tobacco when he made his first voyage to the Americas in 1599, describing it as “a kinde of hearbe, whereof they take the smoake.” When Montagnais chief Anadabijou fêted the French at Tadoussac in 1603, he did what a good Native host should do: he offered them tobacco. Champlain called the festive gathering a tabagie—the word that today in Québec means tobacco shop.

  Native Americans used tobacco to move between the natural and the supernatural worlds and to communicate with the spirits. Smoking helped to get the spirits’ attention, since the spirits loved the smell of burning tobacco, and it helped to get the communicant in the right frame of mind. Shamans used it to induce trances enabling them to pass beyond the natural world to see what the spirits were up to and to peer into the future. Cigarettes today are not particularly hallucinogenic, but Native tobacco had a nicotine content many times higher than what is now smoked, inducing much stronger psychotropic effects. Champlain does not say whether the “wizard” who accompanied his war party to Lake Champlain in 1609 smoked himself into intoxication to prognosticate the outcome of their raid, but he probably did.

  The analgesic properties of tobacco were thought to give smoking medicinal as well as religious properties, realms that overlapped in seventeenth-century pharmacology. In most premodern cultures, sickness signaled a rupture in the proper relationship between the human and spirit worlds, whether because a spirit was intruding into the human world or because the afflicted person’s soul had become lost in the spirit world. Just as it was thought to ease a wide variety of complaints from toothache and snakebite to convulsions and hunger and even asthma, tobacco eased whatever problem arose between the natural and the supernatural worlds to cause the sickness. The healing property of tobacco was a direct application of its spiritual capacity.

  In daily life, tobacco was an important medium of sociability that, like healing, was something that benefited from the spirits’ kind support. Managing social relations on a personal or communal level required thoughtfulness and care, and could be best accomplished when the spirits were on one’s side. Burning or smoking tobacco was a way of propitiating the spirits if they were in an ugly mood—as they so often were—and inducing them to bless your enterprise. Sharing a smoke at a tabagie was done in the presence of the spirits, and it helped the smokers find consensus when differences arose. The sociability of tobacco spread easily from such formal settings into all aspects of Native social life. You used tobacco with friends, you shared it with neighbors, you gave it as a gift to ask for a favor or return thanks. Native people are still great socializers, which is why many are still great smokers.

  Tobacco moved along the webs of trade that Europe’s desire for China was creating between the Americas and the rest of the globe, traveling to new sites and coming into the reach of people who had never taken smoke before, Europeans first of all. With smoking went religious, medical, social, and economic practices that had to find equivalent niches in the new culture. The Cuban historian Fernando Ortiz half a century ago called this process transculturation: the process by which habits and things move from one culture to another so thoroughly that they become part of it and in turn change the culture into which they have moved. Ortiz knew that the “intense, complex, unbroken process” of transculturation can be violently destructive of what is already there, but the outcomes of these globalizing processes cannot be controlled. One moment of culture can become another so quickly that it is difficult to remember how things were in the moment immediately preceding this one.

  So it was with tobacco. Wherever tobacco showed up, a culture that did not smoke became a culture that did. Transculturation happened almost overnight, and was usually well advanced before elites bothered to notice that everyone was smoking and started thinking up reasons why this was not a good thing. Not all of the original meanings of Native smoking made the jump to other cultures, of course. But many did, including the notion that tobacco opened a door to the spiritual realm. Of course, smoking’s religious significance had to change with every new environment it entered. In Tibet, it became the stuff that fierce protector deities consumed to make them even more fierce. The statue of the protector deity of Trandruk Temple in the Yarlung Valley, for instance, waves a human femur reworked into the shape of a pipe to show just how remorseless he can be when he turns his attention on the faithless.

  So too in Europe, smoking drifted into the world of witchcraft. Tobacco was suspect as a medium for getting in touch with the devil. In 1609, the year Champlain went on the warpath, Henri IV commissioned an inquisitor to root sorcery out of rural France. One of the things the inquisitor discovered about witches was that they used tobacco. The inquisitor’s investigations led him to conclude that every witch had “a plant in their garden, no matter how small, the smoke of which they use to clear their head, and to sustain themselves somewhat against hunger.” Wasn’t the simpler explanation that poor women kept a tobacco plant as a balm for hunger and misery? But the inquisitor was looking for witchcraft, not poverty. He was unsure quite what smoking had to do with the terrible things witches were accused of, “but,” he insisted, “I well do know and it is certain that it makes their breath and bodies so stinking that no one who was not accustomed to it could stand it, and they use it three or four times a day.”

  The witch panic in Europe faded through the seventeenth century. With it went the idea that tobacco opened channels of communication with the devil. If suspicious women smoked, it was later reasoned, they did so simply because they liked to, not because they were intent on engaging in black magic. Once smoking was cleared of its association with witchcraft, even the clergy were free to take it up, and they did. The Jesuits remained hostile to the habit, and their Society forbade them from smoking, but they were a minority among the priests. The rest of the Christian clergy took to tobacco with gusto. Indeed, they became such avid smokers, inside churches as well as out, that the Vatican had to intervene. “Decent people” on their way into church, the pope noted in 1643, found the smell of smoking offensive and disliked having to step through the tobacco ash that tended to accumulate around church entrances. Lest their foul personal habits further damage the deteriorating public reputation of the clergy, the Vatican told priests that they could not smoke in church, nor even in the porches at church doors. Priests who wanted to smoke could do so, but not in church and well away from entrances.

  The sight of other people blowing smoke out of their mouths excited both curiosity and suspicion among those seeing it done for the first time. What a strange and dangerous thing to do. The poor were already condemned to pass their winters in smoky hovels inhaling the noxious fumes from cooking fires. Why breathe in smoke when you didn’t have to? Europeans accepted the idea of breathing incense when they went to church, but only as an environmental inhalant, not as a stream of concentrated smoke going directly to their lungs. Smoking is not a natural activity. It has to be learned. Reconstructing that process of learning is what makes the early history of smoking so intriguing.

  Every culture learns to smoke in a slightly different way. How people smoke depends on where the practice comes from, who introduced it, and what local practices or ideas can be adapted to make sense of this strange new habit. A particular challenge for European elites was getting over the association between tobacco and whoever was already smoking, such as Native Americans. The most famous early European diatribe against the “vile barbarous custome” of smoking, from the British monarch James I, struck this theme above all others. Smoking was what “poor wilde barbarous men” did, James pointed out. It belonged to “the barbarous and beastly maners of the wild, godlesse, and slavish Indians” and was not something an Englishman should imitate. Natives were “slaves to t
he Spaniards, refuse to the world, and as yet aliens from the holy Covenant of God”—three strikes against any argument in favor of smoking, at least in the king’s eyes. The complaint had little purchase on the minds of his contemporaries, however. The great Elizabethan historian William Camden could complain all he liked that the English had “degenerated into the nature of Barbarians, since they are delighted, and think they may be cured, with the same things which the Barbarians use,” but by 1615 he had to admit that “in a short time many men everywhere, some for wantonness, some for health sake, with insatiable desire and greediness sucked in the stinking smoak thereof through an earthen pipe.” Unlike Camden or the king, ordinary people didn’t care who started the practice.

  The history of tobacco’s arrival in Europe has mostly been told from the elite side. The account usually starts with the physician Rembert Dodoens, who in 1553 published a popular Latin herbal in Antwerp (a Dutch edition appeared the following year, and a German edition the year after). Dodoens’s herbal contains the first botanical entry on tobacco to appear in a medical text. It is the first written evidence that knowledge of tobacco, possibly even the plant itself, had arrived in the Low Countries. Dodoens didn’t know what to call the plant, so he borrowed the name of a plant with narcotic properties with which he was already familiar, henbane. This weed bears purple-streaked yellow flowers similar to those of the tobacco plant, so the name served provisionally. Shift the story to Portugal three years later, and we find Damião de Goes publishing the claim that his kinsman Luis was the first person to bring the plant from Brazil to Europe. Damião does not specify a date for this historic act, but as Luis later joined the Jesuits and went off to India in 1553, the year Dodoens published his herbology, he must have brought tobacco across the Atlantic before that date. So the distance between knowing about the plant, and experiencing it firsthand, closes. De Goes says he cultivated the plant in his garden in Lisbon, and if he was growing it, he was probably smoking it.