The Opium War

by Julia Lovell

  From its southern point of entry, Canton’s opium made its way to the northernmost edges of the empire: on the carrying poles of small-time peddlers and the backs of domesticated camels; in the caravans of Shanxi and Shaanxi merchants who shifted it into Xinjiang; in the luggage of candidates for the fiercely competitive metropolitan civil-service examinations in Beijing. Almost everywhere that subjects of the emperor travelled, they brought opium with them, if they had a bit of capital to spare. In 1793, John Barrow – comptroller on the first British embassy to China – had noted that opium’s price restricted it to use only by the ‘opulent’.33 By the 1820s, indulgence had begun to seep down the social scale: ‘It started with the rich,’ one south-eastern literatus remembered of the decade, ‘then the lower classes began to emulate.’34 The size and diversity of the opium market in nineteenth-century China showed up in the variety of terms for the drug that existed: yapian (a loanword invented at least as early as the Ming dynasty), the term in current use today, translates literally as ‘crow slices’ – presumably a reference to the blackness of prepared opium. Before this rendering, though, it had already passed through diyejia (probably a simple transliteration from a Greek term for a treacly opiate), yingsu (jar millet – for the poppy’s seeds’ resemblance to those of millet), mi’nang (millet bags) and wuxiang (black fragrance). All through the nineteenth century, yapian coexisted with a host of other references: afurong (literally, poppy), datu or xiaotu (big mud or little mud), yangtu (mud from the Western seas), yangyan (smoke from the Western seas), yangyao (medicine or tonic from the Western seas). The prefix yang, incidentally, did not denote fear or distrust for the alien, but was part of a full-blown mania for the expensive elusiveness of things foreign: ‘foreign things are the most fashionable now,’ observed one mid-nineteenth-century essayist, ‘foreign copper, china, paint, linen, cotton . . . the list is endless.’35 When the Communist Party – while publicly denouncing their rivals, the Nationalists, and Western imperialists for profiting from the drug trade – secretly grew opium to make ends meet in north-west China in the early 1940s, they generated another couple of euphemisms: ‘special product’, and sometimes ‘soap’.36

  By the time of the Opium War, the empire was not just importing and domesticating this prized foreign drug; it was producing it, in tremendous quantities. (Nonetheless, although native opium appealed because of its cheapness, it was always a poor cousin to the foreign product, due to the greater potency of the latter.) Where it grew readily (especially in southwest China, but also along the east coast, and in Shaanxi, Gansu and Xinjiang to the north-west), it was the wonder crop: it sold well, and grew on the same land in an annual cycle alongside cotton, beans, maize and rice. Almost every part of the plant could be used: the sap, for raw opium; the leaves as a vegetable; the stem for dye; the seeds for oil. For southern peasants in the late 1830s, growing opium earned them ten times more than rice. By the time of the Opium War, the trade had spread across the entire empire: smoked (extensively) in prosperous south-eastern metropolises; trafficked; and cultivated (all along the western rim, from the mountain wildernesses of Yunnan in the south, to Xinjiang in the north).

  Opium simply refused to go away: when the state moved to crack down on opium along the south and east coast by banishing smokers and smugglers to the frontier zone of Xinjiang, they merely brought their habit to the north-west. If domestic poppy-growing was cut back in south-western provinces such as Yunnan, civil servants predicted that coastal imports would increase to fill the market space made available. In 1835, officials optimistically announced that the poppy had been eradicated from Zhejiang, in east China; five years later, further investigation revealed that government representatives had lopped only the tops of the plants, carelessly leaving the roots still in the ground. That same year, thirty-four peasants fought officials sent to destroy their crops properly.37

  Sometime in the first decade of the nineteenth century, on a crisp, bright spring day, an emperor’s son sat studying his history books. Bored and tired, he asked his servant to prepare him his pipe. ‘My mind suddenly becomes clear,’ he exclaimed, ‘my eyes and ears refreshed. People have said that wine is endowed with all the virtues, but today I call opium the satisfier. When you desire happiness, it gives you happiness.’ Soon, he felt inspired to poetry: ‘Watch the cloud ascend from your nose/ Inhale – exhale, the fragrance rises/ The air deepens and thickens/ As it settles, it truly seems/ That mountains and clouds emerge from a distant ocean.’38

  In 1820, this same son, Daoguang (1782–1850), himself became the Emperor of China. In another twenty years, he would authorize a campaign against opium that would ultimately result in the disastrously counter-productive engagements of the Opium War. In the years immediately preceding the war, Daoguang – according to one rumour – even executed his own son, for his failure to give up the habit. What had happened in those four decades, to transform opium-smoking from an acceptable displacement activity for an idle emperor-in-training to a perilous scourge?

  The court had, it was true, been uneasy about opium for more than a century before the crackdown of the late 1830s – ever since the first imperial prohibition in 1729, when the Yongzheng emperor (1678–1735) had noted with a shudder that ‘Shameless rascals lure the sons of good families into [smoking] for their own profit . . . youngsters become corrupted until their lives collapse, their families’ livelihood vanishes, and nothing is left but trouble.’39

  Strong words – but for sixty years, little seems to have been done. Smokers and sellers continued the habit: anyone with a head on his shoulders could argue that the opium he was consuming or selling was legally medicinal, not illegally recreational; or simply bribe the relevant parties. Between 1773 and the close of the eighteenth century, annual imports of Chinese opium more than quadrupled.40 The ban of 1729 was reaffirmed in 1796. Again, little was apparently achieved, beyond forcing smugglers to make their deals further along the coast, rather than flagrantly at Canton. Opium was a boom industry: demand, supply and price all grew through the early nineteenth century – an open invitation to local officials to profit. 1799 saw a reaffirmation of the reaffirmation, reminding the populace that opium ‘is of a violent and powerful nature, and possesses a foetid and odious flavour’.41 1811–13 saw the introduction of further punitive measures: a new edict, specifying one hundred blows of the heavy bamboo, a month in the cangue and – a special measure for eunuchs and retainers – slavery for life in the freezing north-east.42 By 1839, imports would have increased tenfold from the start of the century.43

  The Qing’s difficulties in promoting a hard line on smoking were simple: no one seemed able to agree on the extent of the problem, or even whether it was a problem. Despite the rise of a vociferous anti-opium lobby at court from the 1830s onwards, there was little consensus among either Chinese or Western commentators through much of the nineteenth century concerning the effects of the drug either on the human frame, the extent of its use in China or what constituted either heavy use or an addiction. Denunciations accumulated on both sides of the trade. ‘The smoke of opium is a deadly poison’, ran an 1836 pamphlet published by local government in Canton; it ‘never fail[s] to terminate in death’, the American-run Chinese Repository concurred, ‘if the evil habit . . . is continued . . . There is no slavery on earth, to be compared with the bondage into which opium casts its victim.’44 Equally, both sides had apologists for the drug: ‘taken as it almost invariably is, in great moderation,’ one Briton observed during the Opium War, ‘it is by no means noxious to the constitution, but quite the reverse, causing an exhilarating and pleasing sensation, and, in short, does [users] no more harm than a moderate quantity of wine does to us.’45 Smoke opium on a miserable, rainy day, advised one late-eighteenth-century Chinese gentleman, and ‘there is a sudden feeling of refreshment . . . Detached from all worries, you enter a world of dreams and fantasies, free as a spirit. Paradise!’46

  Foreign observers across the rest of the nineteenth century woul
d publicize the physical ravages of opium upon its smokers: ‘inflamed eyes and haggard countenance’; skin bearing ‘that peculiar glassy polish by which an opium-smoker is invariably known.’47 ‘Those who are addicted to opium’, echoed one Manchu Prince of the Imperial Clan Court in 1839, ‘are entranced and powerless to quit, almost as if seduced by the deadly poison, until they stand like skeletons, their bodily shape totally disfigured and no better than the crippled.’48 But others vigorously rejected accounts of opium’s universally degrading effects on the populace: William Hunter, an American trader of the 1820s and 1830s, ‘rarely, if ever, saw any one physically or mentally injured by it. No evidences of a general abuse . . . were apparent . . . smoking was a habit, as the use of wine was with us, in moderation.’49

  This vagueness was in part a symptom of the underdevelopment of a modern medical profession: opium’s ‘particles, by their direct and topical influence on the nerves of the lungs,’ confidently speculated one British army doctor, Duncan McPherson, who saw action in China, ‘guard the system against disease.’50 But taking a hard line on opium in nineteenth-century China was primarily difficult because the drug was so ubiquitously useful: as an antispasmodic, as an analgesic, as a cough, fever and appetite suppressant. For centuries, it had been a palliative against the many commonplace complaints that afflicted the inhabitants of late-imperial China: diarrhoea, fevers, aches and pains, hunger, exhaustion. While China did not produce aspirin (which remained the case at least as late as 1934, even though it was being commercially manufactured back in the 1890s), ‘opium was our medicine, it was all we had’, explained one former soldier in the pay of the Nationalist government (1928–49).51 ‘There is no disease in which opium may not be employed,’ reported McPherson from personal experience, ‘nor do we know of any substance which can supply its place.’52

  Neither was there agreement on the nature or extent of the empire’s drug problem. Since opium was officially illegal, reliable estimates of smokers are elusive. Through the nineteenth century, guesses varied from 0.35, to 5, to 60 per cent of the population.53 Behind these hazy statistics hide other questions: how much did all these smokers use? What constituted occasional, moderate, habitual, dangerous use? Did the addict have to steadily increase his dose? The anti-opium lobby – both Chinese and Western – portrayed the drug as inevitably enslaving its users, forcing them daily to find increasing quantities of cash to fund a destructive addiction. A highly influential set of drawings in the Chinese Repository from 1837 depicted the life-cycle of an opium-smoker, from over-privileged young scion to emaciated sot, his wife and child condemned to lives of pitiless toil to earn money to buy the drug he craves.54 But there were gainsayers of such apocalyptic images, too: anecdotes that told of the entirely reliable broker who smoked opium to excess; or of the zealous reforming official, who happened also to be a confirmed opium-user and brothel-visitor. Compared with alcohol’s ‘evil consequences’, some found the harm of opium to be ‘infinitesimal’; the Chinese were ‘essentially temperate’.55 No observer could agree on what constituted a standard dose: mid-nineteenth-century estimates ran from around four grams, to twenty and beyond.56 The subjects of the Qing empire smoked for as many reasons as Europeans consumed alcohol and tobacco: for show; for companionship; to relieve boredom and pain. Some smoked their lives and estates away; others never got past their first puff; others again limited their doses to a daily post-prandial.

  The only anxiety that runs consistently through Qing attempts to do something about opium concerns the question of social control. Drugs have a universal talent for dismaying the authorities: not only do they consume otherwise usefully productive money and time but, more crucially, they loosen inner psychological constraints, and the sense of restraint that holds convention together. Disquiet about the threat to stability posed by a hedonistic opium culture lurks in every official statement on the drug in the century preceding the Opium War. The first edict of 1729 punished opium-selling by reference to ‘the law on heterodox teachings that delude the masses’.57 The menace that had been identified, therefore, was not physical, but psychological: the possibility of public disorder. ‘The use of opium originally prevailed only among vagrants and disreputable persons,’ lamented the imperial declaration from 1799, ‘but has since extended itself among the members and descendants of respectable families [resulting] in the gratification of impure and sensual desires, whereby their respective duties and occupations are neglected.’58

  Eleven years later, when six packages of the stuff were found on sale in the Forbidden City, the emperor became very angry. Opium, he fulminated, makes its smoker ‘very excited, capable of doing anything he pleases’, adding, almost as an afterthought, ‘before long, it kills him. Opium is a poison,’ he returned to his main theme, ‘undermining our good customs and morality.’59 While China’s educated elites began producing reasoned medical denunciations in the second decade or so of the nineteenth century, concern for individuals’ physical well-being was still prefaced by anxieties about the drug’s effect on public decency. One physician began a collection of anti-opium prescriptions by condemning smoking as an ‘evil pastime’ favoured by ‘those who violate morality and bring ruin upon their families’.60

  The threat posed by opium to political stability was intensified by the government’s financial worries. By the early decades of the nineteenth century – also years of rising opium consumption – the empire seemed to be running out of silver, crucial to the smooth running of the economy because it was the currency in which taxes and the army were paid. If silver became scarce and therefore more expensive, relative to the copper currency used for small, everyday transactions, the tax-paying populace were left squeezed and resentful. Vagrancy, strikes and riots resulted: 110 incidents of mass protest took place between 1842 and 1849, precisely because of the rising cost of silver. The government simultaneously found itself short of funds for spending on the armies and public works that would keep general discontent at bay. The result was a serious rise in social insubordination: ‘Since the beginning of history,’ went one official complaint of 1840, ‘never has there been a people as arrogant or unwilling to obey imperial orders as that of today.’61 Contemporary observation and circumstantial evidence blamed opium. Between 1805 and 1839, imports of opium increased considerably more than tenfold, from 3,159 to 40,200 chests per year. At the same time, China’s balance of payments uncharacteristically entered the red: between 1800 and 1810, around $26 million travelled into China; between 1828 and 1836, around $38 million travelled out.62 Panicked observers guessed that China’s wealth had been reduced by 50 per cent – the reality was probably around the 19 per cent mark. By the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century, opium suddenly seemed to be everywhere – in north, west, south, east and central China, with Guangdong (opium’s main province of origin, in the deep south) the great plughole down which the empire’s silver was apparently vanishing. Opium use increased at just the right moment to be fingered as the culprit for a rich repertoire of late-Qing ills: economic stagnation, environmental exhaustion, overpopulation, decline of the army and general standards of public order.

  Despite this perception, it is far from clear that opium was exclusively to blame for the silver famine. Until 1852, China never imported more than eight million pounds of opium per year. Over the next forty years, opium imports exceeded this quantity in all but four years, sometimes nearing 10.6 million. And yet, after a decline in silver revenues up to around 1855 – and a concomitant decline in the effectiveness of the Qing state – bullion supplies picked up in the second half of the century (despite increases in opium use), enabling the Qing to hold on through the massive civil crisis of the Taiping Rebellion. From 1856 to 1886, the Chinese economy was once more in credit, with some $691 million flowing back to the empire.63 If opium truly was the villain of the piece in the first half of the century, why did the Chinese economy not go further into the red after opium imports soared after 1842? To answer this quest
ion, we have to look beyond the British–Indian–Chinese trade triangle, and at the impact of South American independence movements on global silver supply.

  Curiously – for it was a dynasty preoccupied with questions of security and sovereignty – the Qing had long allowed itself to be dependent on foreign silver supplies: on imports from South America, gained through Chinese trading in the Philippines, or through exports to Europe. In the forty years up to 1829, Mexico was producing around 80 per cent of the world’s silver and gold. But independence movements between the 1810s and 1820s caused an estimated 56.6 per cent decline in world silver production relative to the 1790s. Given late-imperial China’s involvement in the global economy through its need for foreign silver, the sudden reduction in Latin American supplies was bound to have a noticeable effect. First of all, it diminished the amount of silver that Britain had to spend on tea and silk in China; consequently, such exports from China grew only slowly in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Secondly, British traders were obliged to reach more and more for opium, rather than for scarce bullion, to exchange for the tea and silk that they did buy. All this suggests that while opium imports certainly had an impact on China’s silver reserves, the effect would not have been so crippling if the first boom-period for imports had not coincided with a serious contraction of the world silver supply. Had this not been the case, it seems possible that China could have paid for its opium habit in the time-honoured fashion: with tea and silk. In other words, it was arguably not the opium trade alone that led to the financial instability of Qing China, but also global problems in the production and distribution of silver.64