Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  WE HAVE OBSERVED THAT sixteenth-century Europeans felt obliged to come up with ways of making sense of tobacco. Seventeenth-century writers in China worked at the same problem of understanding something so foreign and new.

  Take Yao Lü, an obscure writer whose Dew Book is now extremely rare. In the front half of his book, Yao jots down his views on ancient matters; in the back, he muses on modern things, and that is where we find his thoughts on danbagu. Yao assumes his reader is ignorant of what smoking entails, so he explains that “you use fire to burn a bowlful, then bring the pipe to your mouth. The smoke goes through the stem and down your throat.” The effect of inhaling the smoke he analogizes to drunkenness, referring to danbagu’s alternate name, “golden-shred inebriant.” He gives Luzon as tobacco’s place of origin and the Zhangzhou port of Moon Harbor as its point of entry. Indeed, he notes that the farmers of Zhangzhou adapted it so well that “now there is more here than in Luzon, so they ship it to that country to sell it.” Serious smokers, however, felt that domestic tobacco was no match for Luzon tobacco—just as Filipinos regarded their tobacco as inferior to American, and as the English regarded their homegrown weed as weaker than Virginian. Within China, Fujian tobacco was considered the best. “People in the Yangzi Valley and the Hunan interior are planting it,” another Chinese writer reports, “but theirs lacks the yellow hue and fineness of leaf of the tobacco grown in Fujian.” Still, even this second-rate tobacco found a market.

  Not all Chinese intellectuals were at ease with the idea that something so wonderful could be entirely foreign in origin. Some preferred to think that it had been in China all along, so they scanned the voluminous records of the past—the culture’s repository of good sense—in the hope of discovering that tobacco was safely Chinese after all. The poet-painter Wu Weiye, for instance, could not rest easy with the common view that “the smoke plant was not heard of in ancient times.” He eventually found a phrase in the official history of the Tang dynasty about “holy fire” and offered this reference as proof that Chinese were already smoking in the ninth century. Taking up smoking in the seventeenth century was simply reviving a precedent. This wasn’t true, of course, but it was Wu’s way of trying to come to terms with tobacco’s foreign origin—trying, in effect, to negate the reality of transculturation by believing that the practice of smoking was already thoroughly and safely Chinese.

  The more effective way of finding a legitimate cultural niche in China for tobacco was to argue, as many did early on, that tobacco could have a place in Chinese medicine. It was a herb capable of producing powerful effects within the body, after all, so why not graft it onto the existing system of medical botany? Yao Lü, for instance, believed that tobacco “can block malarial vapours.” He also reported that pounding its leaves into a paste and rubbing that into the scalp got rid of head lice. Fang Yizhi accepted that tobacco had pharmacopoeic properties, though he worried that its drying capacity was too fierce for safe use. “It can be used to dispel dampness,” he allows, “but long usage heats up the lungs. Other medicines mostly have no effect. Those afflicted with tobacco poisoning will suddenly vomit a yellowish liquid and die.”

  The best early medical assessment of tobacco comes from the influential Hangzhou physician and medical writer of the early seventeenth century, Zhang Jiebin. Zhang was puzzled as to how to classify this new plant. He decided, mistakenly, to put tobacco in his pharmacopoeia alongside plants that grow in marshy conditions, but it was a late addition. Zhang numbers the entries in his book, and the entry for tobacco appears between entries “77” and “78” under a heading that we might translate as “77+.” Zhang starts the entry by describing tobacco’s taste and properties. Then he outlines what ailments it can treat and under what conditions it should be avoided. He cross-references it to his entry on betel nut. There he notes that both plants inspire habitual use, especially among southerners, but that betel nut is milder and better suited for treating digestive ailments.

  Zhang admits to having tried tobacco, as a good experimental scientist should. He did not become an enthusiast, however. He judged the taste acrid and the sensation that a few puffs produced, which he describes as a type of intoxication, not pleasurable. He found that the effect took a long time to wear off. For those who want to get rid of the sensation, Zhang advises taking cold water or refined sugar. These are strong yin substances that can counteract the near-pure yang of tobacco. In mild doses, Zhang allows that tobacco’s yang can help the body to dispel phlegm, remove congestion, warm the internal organs, and speed circulation. Too much of the drug, however, will do more harm than good—though in that, tobacco was no different from any other medicinal plant.

  Tobacco eventually shed the fanciful pharmacological and botanical explanations attached to it, and dire predictions about vomiting yellowish liquid dropped from sight. Especially after the ban became a dead letter, everyone in China started smoking. Dong Han, a Shanghai essayist writing late in the seventeenth century, wonders how this came about. Dong starts by noting that, outside Fujian Province, only 1 or 2 percent of people took up smoking before the 1640s. Thereafter, however, smoking spread throughout the Yangtze Delta, taking hold in the cities and then spreading into the villages, first among men and then with women. In his own time it had become standard etiquette when guests arrived to offer them a smoke. Dong has no answer as to why this happened, nor whether he became a smoker too. He can only shrug and say, “There’s really no knowing why it is that people change their customs.”

  Other writers make much the same observations about smoking spreading rapidly to all classes, all ages, and both genders. As one pharmacologist put it, “Among those throughout the realm who enjoy smoking, there is no distinction of high and low, or of male and female.” Even the very young, especially if they were from Fujian, took up the habit. European visitors to China in the nineteenth century were amazed to see girls of eight or nine years of age carrying pipes and tobacco in their pockets and purses. If they were not yet smoking, they were at least adopting the accessories they needed to appear grown up.

  Upper-class women were especially enthusiastic about smoking. We catch a striking glimpse of unusual smoking practices among elegant women in a curious observation that an eighteenth-century writer records when writing about the customs of the elite of Suzhou, the busy commercial and cultural hub on the Yangtze Delta. It seems that the grand ladies of Suzhou smoked from the moment they got up to the moment they went to bed. Given their busy social schedules, the smoking habit put pressure on how they organized their days, more especially on how they organized their mornings. The writer says that elegant Suzhou women refused to get up until they had had several pipefuls of tobacco. Since this delayed the arduous but essential task of doing their hair and makeup before emerging, they ordered their maids to do their coiffures while they were still asleep. That way, they could afford the time to smoke before getting out of bed. The scene is a little hard to imagine.

  Chinese women may have smoked just as fiercely as men, but their bodies were believed to be different. Smoking should have different effects based on the physiological differences between men and women. Being of the yang gender, men were better able to withstand the heat of smoking. The yang of their bodies counteracted the yang of the tobacco. Women were of the yin gender, and their damp constitutions might be damaged by the heating effect of so much yang. They needed to protect themselves from the natural excess of yang that came with smoking. The issue was not, strictly speaking, only one of gender, for doctors gave elderly men, whose natural yang was weak, the same advice. For both groups, the yang of tobacco smoke could be reduced by drawing it through pipes with longer stems. The Chinese pipe was an imitation of the Native American pipe, as were early pipes in Europe, but the stem of Chinese pipes grew longer and longer, and among women became almost unmanageable. A woman poet of the eighteenth century, remembered only as Master Lü’s Wife, jokes about the inconvenience of smoking such a pipe in her dressing room:

&n
bsp; This long stick of a tobacco pipe

  Is too big to put on my dressing table;

  When I lift it, it tears the window paper—

  I hook the moonlight and drag it in.

  Another way of mitigating the heat of tobacco was to cool the smoke by passing it through that most yin of substances, water—hence the appeal of the water pipe, or hookah. Unlike in the Ottoman world, where it was first developed, the water pipe in China was reserved exclusively for women. In fact, a finely crafted water pipe became the sign of an elegant female. By the nineteenth century, no woman of style would deign to puff on a plain-stemmed pipe. Pipes were strictly for men and the lower classes. The same fashion mechanism went into effect when factory-made cigarettes arrived at the beginning of the twentieth century and pursued their long-drawn-out battle against pipes. A man might take them up, but a woman who smoked a cigarette was being risqué. By the 1920s, however, a female urban sophisticate would not be caught dead smoking a pipe. That was for the old hags back in the villages.

  Just as women fit tobacco into their lives in ways that suited their habits, so too did men. Gentlemen were particularly concerned to conform their smoking to the requirements of the socially elegant life. Addicted to tobacco, they wanted it to be seen as part of what made a gentleman a gentleman and not a commoner. Given that everyone already smoked, it was not immediately obvious how this should be done. But gradually a set of customs was developed to give smoking the patina of distinctive refinement. To start with, one had to buy the more expensive brands of tobacco, since price was assumed to discriminate the connoisseur from the mere consumer. Yet that was not enough of a barrier between elite and common, since anyone with enough money but no taste could still enter the charmed circle on this basis. There had to be rituals around these activities that distinguished the elegant gentleman from the rich boor. Gentlemen had to practice their indulgence of tobacco differently from ordinary people.

  One way in which they construed their taste for tobacco differently was to treat the compulsion to smoke as a sign of the true gentleman. Elegant men, declared one elite commentator, “cannot do without it however briefly, and to the end of their lives never tire of it.” Addiction was not a physical shortcoming, as we like to interpret it, but the sign of a passionate mind. A gentleman did not smoke just because he liked to; everyone liked to smoke. He did so because his sensitive nature turned him into a yanke, “tobacco’s guest” or “tobacco’s bondservant.” The refined gentleman experienced the desire to smoke as an estimable compulsion, something that his pure nature could not allow him to do without. It seems to us like an elevated way of explaining nicotine addiction before that concept was available; but for the Chinese elite it was more than that. It was a marker of social status deeply embedded in the particular cultural norms of late-imperial China.

  Around this sense of compulsion grew up an elite culture of smoking, in praise of which the poets were enlisted. Hundreds of poems on the subject of tobacco survive from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The noted poet Shen Deqian wrote an entire cycle of smoking poems, in which he presents smoking as the most refined of pleasures and the most elegant of pastimes, quite beyond the appreciation of ordinary folk. If they appear in the poems, it is only as servants, never as smokers. Here he describes his ivory pipe:

  Through my pipe I draw the fiery vapour,

  From out of my chest I spew white clouds.

  The attendant takes away the ash,

  Brings wine to amplify the intoxication.

  I apply the flame to know the taste,

  Letting it burn in the elephant’s tusk.

  Smoke in turns presents the poet with an image that allows him to align smoking to clouds and the heavenly realm of Daoist immortals and even the cosmos, all of which lie far beyond the reach of ordinary human experience. Another poet similarly associates tobacco smoke with the summoning of souls, like incense before an ancestral tablet:

  Soul-summoning fragrance rises from the tobacco:

  All over the country all the time the plant is being picked.

  I laugh to think that in days of yore people had only ordinary leaves

  As I watch a world of smoke and cloud pour out of you.

  These poems appear in an anthology of poetry and prose devoted entirely to the theme of smoking. The collection was assembled in the eighteenth century by Chen Cong, a gentleman of leisure living just west of Shanghai. Chen had a local reputation as a poet, but The Tobacco Manual is the book for which he is best known. Smoking was the great passion of his life, and the only way he can explain this passion is to suppose an affinity with a past life. He muses that he must have been a Buddhist monk once, and that “my having burned incense in an earlier life” explains why he is compelled to inhale burning fumes in this life. In his book he anthologizes the work of prominent poets, like Shen Deqian, but he also includes poems he commissioned his friends to write specially for the volume. One friend responded to his invitation by describing Chen (“my arriving guest”) coming to his home. Naturally, politeness demands that he receive his visitor by offering him a smoke:

  The tobacco box is casually produced for my arriving guest,

  A gentleman who has known all the matters of my heart for a decade.

  Poetic blossoms have sprung from his brush since his childhood,

  And now The Tobacco Manual emerges from our clouds of smoke.

  If Chen Cong is smoking’s literary chronicler, Lu Yao is its arbiter of taste. His Smoking Manual of 1774 is a documentary of smoking practices as well as a guide explaining how to smoke elegantly. “In recent times there has not been one gentleman who does not smoke,” Lu declares. “Liquor and food they can dispense with, but tobacco they absolutely cannot do without.” Since everyone was smoking, it was essential that the well-bred smoker learn not to do it like any common rustic. Smoking was part of one’s personality, and had to be done in a way that expressed the smoker’s social distinction. Lu’s passion in his book is thus to align smoking with elegance. To this end, he compiles several lists of good and bad smoking decorum: when it is appropriate to smoke and when it is taboo, when the smoker should restrain the urge to smoke and when it can be done without offense. He notes that “even women and children all have a pipe in their hands,” but his instructions are not for them. They are for his social peers.

  Lu dictates certain occasions when it is appropriate to light up: when you have just woken up, after a meal, and when you are entertaining a guest. He also advocates smoking as a stimulant for writing, as many a contemporary did. “When you are moistening the ink and licking the brush to compose poetry and just cannot loosen your thoughts, hum in quiet meditation and inhale some fine tobacco: it cannot help but be of some aid.” There were, however, occasions when it absolutely did not do to smoke: when listening to string music, for instance, or looking at plum blossoms, or performing a ritual ceremony. He reminded his readers that smoking was definitely inappropriate when you appeared before the emperor. It was also not to be indulged in while making love with a “beautiful woman,” by which he meant someone other than your wife.

  Lu’s book is also full of practical advice. Don’t smoke while riding a horse. You may stick your tobacco pouch and pipe in your belt so that you can smoke once you get where you’re going—to forget to bring your own tobacco could put you in an awkward situation later on—but don’t light up until you dismount. Similarly, while walking on fallen leaves is not a good time to light up, nor while standing next to a pile of old paper. Lu also offers face-saving tips on decorum. Don’t smoke while coughing up phlegm or when your breathing rasps. If you keep trying to light your pipe and it doesn’t catch, just put it aside. In other words, don’t let your smoking create a poor appearance. One final piece of strategic advice is offered for the socially overburdened. If you have a guest on your hands whom you would rather see depart, don’t bring out the tobacco. He’ll only linger.

  Tobacco enthusiast Chen Cong. From his
Tobacco Manual, 1805.

  THIS ELEGANT HABIT OF REFINED consumption morphed unexpectedly in the nineteenth century into something quite different, and quite unexpected: opium addiction. The poppy from which opium is refined was, like tobacco, of foreign origin, though it had long ago been indigenized in China as an expensive medicine used to relieve a range of ailments from constipation and abdominal cramps to toothache and general debility. It was not something you smoked, however; it was taken in pill or tonic form. By one report, a considerable amount of opium, under the pleasant name of “hibiscus medicine,” went to the imperial palace in the later reigns of the Ming dynasty, where it was used for its pharmacopoeic properties and not as a recreational drug. Given the general understanding that all things ingested affected the well-being of the body, the line between the two was not sharply drawn.

  At the turn of the seventeenth century, the Dutch started bringing opium from India into Southeast Asia, where they sold it as a mood enhancer, specifically with military applications. It was believed that if opium was given to soldiers, it made them fearless. In 1605, the VOC was able to use a gift of gunpowder and six pounds of opium to entice the king of Ternate, one of the smaller Spice Islands boasting a huge output of cloves, into a trading relationship. Both were to use in wars against his rivals. When Muslims in the southern Philippines were fighting the Spanish in the following decade, it was said that an assassin dispatched to kill the Spanish commander had rendered himself fearless by taking opium before carrying out his assignment.