The consumption of opium broadened only when it merged with an agent that could deliver the drug in a palatable form, and that agent was none other than tobacco. Soaking tobacco leaves in a solution derived from the sap of opium poppies produced a far more potent form of tobacco. This doctored product was called madak, and it seems to have been taken up as a more potent version of tobacco rather than as a different drug altogether. The practice started among Chinese trading with the Dutch on Taiwan, where they briefly maintained a base until 1662. From there it slipped into China. Chen Cong assumed that it arrived by the same route as tobacco, entering Moon Harbor from Manila, but it is the Dutch rather than the Spanish who get the credit for the drug’s introduction—yet another strand in Indra’s seventeenth-century web.
Opium and tobacco had two things in common. They were smoked, and they had come to China from a distant place through foreign hands. Lu Yao and Chen Cong both decided that this was enough to justify including the subject of opium in their tobacco manuals, although opium was shifting away from madak form just at this time. By late in the eighteenth century, opium was not smoked as madak. It was consumed directly by igniting small lumps in a pipe bowl tilted over an oil lamp, then inhaling the smoke through the stem. The modern opium fix had found its form.
From what Chen Cong was able to learn about opium, the substance was not just a more potent form of tobacco. He makes this point after quoting at length this anonymous description of opium intoxication as “the realm of perfect happiness”: “How shall I describe the beauties of opium? Its smell is fragrant, its taste lightly sweet, and it deals well with a dampened spirit and melancholy thoughts. As soon as I lie down and lean on an armrest to inhale, my spirit revives, my head clears, and my vision becomes sharper. Then my chest expands and my exaltation doubles. After some time my bones and sinews feel tired and my eyes want to close. At that moment I plump my pillow and lie in perfect peace without a care in the world”—to which Chen skeptically replies, “Oh, really?” Lu Yao likewise is suspicious of this potent form of “smoke.” He even revives the specter of death by smoking, which Chinese tobacco wisdom had set aside a century earlier.
Opium’s “realm of perfect happiness” was a space many Chinese chose to enter during the next great wave of globalization in the nineteenth century, when English traders brought opium from India to China to reverse the trade deficit that came from buying so much tea. (They also started building tea plantations in India to reduce the distance and therefore the cost of transport.) Chinese merchants proved willing to retail this profitable commodity, promoting its distribution throughout the country. Opium would work its way into all levels of society, just as tobacco had done, forcing a far more troubling transculturation that still haunts Chinese memories of their past and serves as an enduring symbol of China’s victimization by the West.
Just how successfully opium transculturated into China is illustrated by the following poem, which invokes all the standard Daoist tropes of tobacco poetry to domesticate the drug. This poem appears in a little booklet called The Condolence Collection. The booklet is a collection of verses suitable for sending on the death of a friend. Each verse is crafted to suit a particular occasion. The poems in the last section have been tagged according to cause of death. The following verse, marked as suitable for sending on the occasion of a death by opium overdose, shows how thoroughly the taste for opium was lodged in the culture that received it:
Swallowing dawn mist and drinking sea vapors, he was indifferent [to censure];
Through opium pods and incense, he proved himself immortal before his time.
He may have sealed up his white bones with opium paste,
Yet never he will be without a lamp to illuminate the Yellow Springs [Hades].
Relying on his opium pipe, he expended great effort to comprehend his fate,
In the midst of fire and smoke, he uttered his final thoughts.
Mounting a crane and bestriding the wind, where has he now gone?
He has simply followed the tide of smoke, arriving at the Western Heaven.
The romance of opium has long since disappeared. In its turn, the long era of global tobacco smoking is fitfully approaching an end. But we should remember that our rejection of smoking is quite recent. Back in 1924, tobacco was not something to deplore or give up.
When the German polymath Berthold Laufer in that year published his pamphlet on the history of tobacco in Asia, he ended it by praising smoking. “Of all the gifts of nature, tobacco has been the most potent social factor, the most efficient peacemaker, and greatest benefactor to mankind. It has made the whole world akin and united it into a common bond. Of all luxuries it is the most democratic and the most universal; it has contributed a large share toward democratizing the world. The very word has penetrated into all languages of the globe, and is understood everywhere.” Though smokers can today still be counted in the hundreds of millions worldwide, this sentiment is no longer one we embrace. Pleasure and health now go in different directions.
As the global community of smokers grew in the seventeenth century, though, they were uninhibited in expressing their delight at discovering the pleasures of tobacco and have left behind many signs of their debt to its pleasures. One of the more exuberant and unexpected is a tobacco ballet that the townspeople of Turin, Italy, staged in 1650. The first act of the ballet opens with a troupe of townspeople dressed up in native costumes, dancing together and singing their praises to God for having given humankind such a wonderful herb. The dramatist may have acquired the idea for this scene from illustrations of Native customs in books about the Americas, which were popular with European readers. (Such exotic public displays of Native customs were a fashion unto themselves, especially if one had actual Natives to perform them. Johann Maurits, who used the fortune he made from plantations in Brazil to build the palatial residence in The Hague that is now the Mauritshuis museum, included in the opening ceremonies a dance by eleven Brazilian Indians on the cobbled square out front.) In the second act of the tobacco ballet, another troupe of townspeople appears. This group is dressed in costumes from all over the world. Surely the pantomime would have called for someone to be in Chinese costume. There was a Chinese smoking on the Van Meerten plate, so there probably was one in the Turin ballet. The show ends with these representatives of world cultures making their way together to a School for Smoking, where they sit down and beg the first troupe to instruct them in the virtues of tobacco.
1. JOHANNES VERMEER, VIEW OF DELFT. Vermeer has chosen the subject of his sole large outdoor landscape carefully. This is the Kolk, the river harbour at the southeast corner of Delft from which boats sailed down to the Rhine. A passenger barge is moored at the left, waiting for travelers to board. Along the far shore under the imposing Schiedam Gate are river transport boats. By the Rotterdam Gate to the right lie two herring busses, with which fishermen harvested North Sea herring, undergoing refitting. Above this quiet moorage is the busy skyline of Delft. The steeple standing in sunlight belongs to the New Church. The red-tiled roofs left of the Schiedam Gate mark the offices and warehouse of the East India Company, which was responsible for much of what went into the transport boats moored outside the gate. Barely poking above these roofs, to the left of the conical tower of the Parrot Brewery, is the steeple of the Old Church, where Vermeer is buried. It was painted in 1660 or 1661.
2. JOHANNES VERMEER, OFFICER AND LAUGHING GIRL. Mild perspectival distortion imparts visual dynamism to this conversation between the officer in his scarlet tunic and the young woman. The domestic setting contains many signs of the outside world. The tinted wine glass the young woman cups in her hands comes, if not from the Murano glassworks in Venice, then from Venetian glassblowers in Antwerp who fled there a century earlier. The map, printed by Willem Blaeu from Delft plates, depicts the provinces of Holland and West Friesland surrounded in beige on three sides by the Zuidersee, the Rhine estuary, and the North Sea across the top. Three dozen tiny ships recall the
fleets of Dutch East India Company. Finally, there is the grand hat on the officer’s head, fashioned from felt manufactured from the fur of beavers trapped in the eastern woodlands of Canada. The painting dates from around 1658.
3. JOHANNES VERMEER, YOUNG WOMAN READING A LETTER AT AN OPEN WINDOW. This may be the earliest of the many paintings in which Vermeer staged models and things around furniture in his studio. The letter-reader is probably Catharina, wearing the same dress she will don for Officer and Laughing Girl. We see her twice, once in profile and once obliquely reflected in the panes of the open window, and this twofold portrait doubles the sense of someone wholly absorbed in her reading. Tumbled on the table lie two of the favourite imports of the era, a Turkish carpet and a Chinese dish. The dish, a piece of blue-and-white export ware from the kiln town of Jingdezhen, is of a style that was all the rage when Vermeer painted this picture, about 1657. The sunlight on the fruit is Vermeer’s first use of pointillist technique.
4. JOHANNES VERMEER, THE GEOGRAPHER. This is one of a pair of paintings, of a man of learning, probably commissioned by the subject. The other, The Astronomer, shares the same theme of the pursuit of knowledge. The model may well be Antony van Leeuwenhoek, draper, surveyor, developer of the microscope, and a Vermeer family friend. Although the date of 1669 that appears on the wall above Vermeer’s signature is not original, it may correctly date the painting. The room is littered with signs of the outside world. Another Turkish carpet fills the foreground, while all around the scholar are spread nautical maps showing the routes that mariners were taking across the oceans. A sea chart of Europe printed by Willem Blaeu hangs on the back wall, and a globe published by Hendrick Hondius on his father’s design sits on the wardrobe. The geographer poses as the hero caught in a moment of reflection, striving to assemble a comprehensive account of the world from the new geographical knowledge pouring into Europe from all over the globe.
5. A PLATE FROM THE LAMBERT VAN MEERTEN MUSEUM OF DELFT. What looks like a Chinese porcelain plate is neither porcelain nor Chinese. The plate itself is glazed earthenware, as the chips on the right side of the rim reveal, probably manufactured in Delft around the end of the seventeenth century. The decorative elements are all faux-Chinese images, which the anonymous painter has picked up from sources that are now lost. The iconography suggests he was copying from a popular Chinese religious text. Five monks, one of them smoking a pipe, populate the clouds in the foreground to the left. A magical boy on a unicorn-like creature appears across from them, and figures looking variously like Daoist deities or Confucian officials walk in the Oriental garden. On the bridge above them, a slightly crazed-looking man with a crutch tries to capture a crane, the Chinese symbol of longevity. The plate as a whole offers a delightfully cluttered impression of whimsy, humour, and Oriental bizarrerie.
6. JOHANNES VERMEER, WOMAN HOLDING A BALANCE. We do not know whether Vermeer titled this work when he painted it about 1664, but when it was put on auction in Amsterdam thirty-two years later, it was called A Young Lady Weighing Gold. A later collector changed the name to A Woman Weighing Pearls, presumably because of the visual prominence of the strings of pearls on the table. In fact, the woman—and, again, the model was probably Catharina Bolnes—is weighing not pearls or gold, but coins. If the pearls are in the picture, it is because they were stored in the same box in which this householder keeps her cash, and have to be removed when she lifts out the scales. And if coins have to be weighed, it is because the Dutch were not as yet using completely standardized coins, and the weight of the metal mattered. The Flemish painting of the Last Judgment behind her head underscores the act of judging, though she herself is guilty only of being a good accountant. The sedate yet dynamic composition show Vermeer at the height of his creative powers.
7. HENDRIK VAN DER BURCH, THE CARD PLAYERS. With this painting, Van der Burch tries his hand at exactly the same subject that Vermeer depicts in Officer and Laughing Girl, an officer courting a young woman in a domestic apartment, though with conspicuously less success. The perspectival distortion is less compelling, the choreography less dynamic, the faces less mobile. Whereas Vermeer placed only a limited number of things in the room, Van der Burch disperses our attention by adding other objects to the painting’s inventory of possessions: playing cards, a blue-and-white jug with a gilded lid that could be real Chinese porcelain or a delftware imitation, a bird cage, and a sword slung from a bandolier. Most strikingly of all, a black boy with gold earrings occupies dead centre. The painting dates to about 1660, by which time Van der Burch had left Delft, where he trained as an artist, to pursue his trade in Leiden and Amsterdam.
8. LEONAERT BRAMER, THE JOURNEY OF THE THREE MAGI TO BETHLEHEM. Leonaert Bramer was a mentor for the young Vermeer—he interceded with Maria Thins to let him marry Catharina Bolnes—and may have instructed him in Italian painting technique. The painting dates back to the decade Vermeer was born, the 1630s, and appears to be one of a series of pictures illustrating the events surrounding Christ’s birth. Bramer depicts the three kings traveling to Bethlehem from the east following a star, here personified as an angel bearing a torch. White, turbaned in faux-Oriental fashion, and on foot, Caspar and Melchior occupy the centre of the canvas. Balthasar is behind them on camelback in the gloom. He, along with his attendant, is black. The presentation of the three kings as being two white and one black was standard iconography by the 1630s, but it was an innovation of the 1440s when the first African slaves started to arrive in Lisbon.
6
WEIGHING SILVER
EIGHT YEARS HAVE passed since Johannes Vermeer painted Officer and Laughing Girl and Young Woman Reading a Letter by an Open Window. His wife, Catharina Bolnes, has spent most of those years pregnant, and if I am right in seeing her as the model in those paintings, she appears to be pregnant again when her husband brings her into his studio to pose for Woman Holding a Balance (see plate 6). Catharina is looking older. Now in her early thirties, she is no longer girlish in posture or manner, and more the mistress of her emotions. Then she was absorbed in the excitements of youth; now she calmly concentrates, without seeming effort, on the task before her. Vermeer has darkened the studio to subdue the animation in his earlier versions of this room by closing the lower shutters and letting the drape over the upper window block out much of the light from outside. Catharina holds a balance. Her hand is positioned precisely at the painting’s vanishing point, but the focus of our attention is on her face. Serenely composed, almost a mask, its untroubled concentration draws our gaze. Our eyes may dart to the strings of luminescent pearls and the shining gold chain slung carelessly over the edge of her jewelry case, but they return to her.
The only suggestion of movement is the painting of the Last Judgment in the Flemish style hanging on the wall behind Catharina. Her head and upper torso are framed by an apocalyptic vision of Christ with his arms raised, summoning the dead to arise and be judged by him. His heavenly throne glows directly over the woman’s head, and mortals on either side of her look to the heavens and clamor to be saved. Contrary to the animation and violent motion of this picture, Catharina appears as calm and untroubled as the whitewashed stretch of wall beside the heavily framed canvas. The painting-within-the-painting is there to guide the viewer to the theme of moral discrimination. The conscientious must carefully weigh their conduct just as Christ will weigh good and evil at the Final Judgment. Vermeer may even have intended that we observe Catharina’s gentle posture and think of the Virgin Mary, who intercedes on behalf of poor sinners so that they too may enter heaven.
The allegory of judgment is obvious. But let us set aside the painting’s iconography and direct our attention instead to what the real woman in this painting is actually doing. She is holding a balance preparatory to weighing something, but what? This painting was once known as Woman Weighing Pearls, but that title doesn’t fit. There are one or two strings of pearls on the table, but they have been casually set aside; no individual pearls are waiting to be weighed. The onl
y things on the table that she might put in her balance are the coins along the edge of the table to her left: four small gold coins and one large silver coin. This is a painting of a woman about to weigh money. Contemporaries would have seen this more clearly than we do, as this was a common subject for Dutch painters at this time. Indeed, Vermeer may have taken the subject, and even the design, of this painting from a less successful picture by his fellow Delft artist Pieter de Hooch.
When Vermeer’s painting was put up for sale in the auction of his son-in-law’s collection in 1696, it was called Young Lady Weighing Gold. This catalog title brings us closer to the subject, Gelt being the Germanic word for “money.” Weighing coins is not something we do today, but it was an essential part of economic transactions in the seventeenth century. Silver and gold coins of the time were softer than they are today, and use gradually wore down the metal, reducing the weight of silver or gold each coin contained. The careful householder therefore had to weigh her coins to know how much they were really worth. This problem would have been negligible were there a standard currency in use, but one had yet to be established. The United Provinces had a standard unit of account, the guilder, but there were no actual guilders in circulation in the 1660s when Vermeer painted this picture, only silver ducats (one of which weighed 24.37 grams). The guilder (weighing 19.144 grams of fine silver) had been issued in the mid-sixteenth century, but was thereafter superseded by other coins, some Spanish and some Dutch. Fortunately for the burgeoning commercial economy, the substitution of one type of coin for another did not interfere with the main purpose of money, which is to calibrate the relative value of objects. The real constant in these calculations was the price of the precious metal in the coin, not its face value. Still, no European state allowed its merchants to set prices by weight in unminted silver, which was the Chinese practice at this time. In the Dutch Republic, every commodity had a price in guilders, even when there were no guilders in circulation, and had to be paid for in coin. In 1681, the States of Holland, the provincial government for the Delft region, decided to revive the guilder (resetting its value at 9.61 grams of fine silver). The much larger silver ducat continued to be used elsewhere in the Netherlands for another decade, until at last the entire Republic went over to guilders.
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