by Martin Booth
The anarchy of banditry across China was extensive and the brigands no strangers to opium themselves. In Ten Weeks with Chinese Bandits, published in 1926, Dr Harvey J. Howard, an American ophthalmologist at Peking Union Medical College, told of his capture by outlaws in northern Manchuria. He recorded how they lived a hard, probably short life: the only consolation they had was opium, which they would do anything to get. The bandits constantly discussed the price and supply of opium much, as Howard recorded, as Western soldiers talked about whisky or beer. He reported that:
Opium smoking seemed to fill their every need. It often took the place of food, sleep and recreation with them. In fact every necessity and all other luxuries were as nothing compared to the indulgence in this one vice. When they had plenty of crude opium, their happiness appeared to be complete. When they were without it, they were demons to live with. Undoubtedly the craving for this drug had driven many of them into the bandit business.
From the 1890s, some Chinese smokers had started to follow the developing Hong Kong trend for morphine: by 1900, this form of addiction was spreading fast. To combat it, the government first taxed morphine in 1902 then banned its import and refining in 1909. The ineluctable result was to propel a previously legitimate trade underground. By 1920, a pound of morphine which wholesaled for £12 in the London pharmaceutical industry fetched £210 in Shanghai.
Morphine smuggling was conducted primarily by the Japanese who ran it into China by way of Manchuria, Formosa, Hong Kong, French Indo-China and Korea. All the morphine was manufactured in Britain and the smuggling of it did not abate, despite restrictions on sales.
The dangers morphine posed the addict, which were far greater than those of opium, were not unknown. The Peking and Tientsin Times published an article just before Christmas 1924 commenting on the rise of morphine use in China. The account mentioned a wholesale morphine pill-maker, named Wang Lo-shan, in the town of Ch’u Hsien, who made a daily sale of 500,000 pills within his district, a small army of peddlers covering a daily round. It was noted once a morphine habit was acquired, the addict would not revert to opium unless morphine was utterly unobtainable. The article continued:
The man who swallows a dozen morphia pills a day has swallowed more physical destruction than the average opium smoker, and he does it without the loss of time involved in the laborious smoking process. Reports from many parts of China show an increase in the habit of opium-eating because it is easy and less expensive. The desired effect is produced by a very much smaller quantity [and] many coolies divide their daily quantum into three parts; two are eaten during the day, and the third smoked in the leisure of the evening.
Once comparative political stability returned with the coming to power of Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang, or National Party, government in Nanking in 1924, China carried on its war against opium. By now, the prevalence of the drug throughout China was so extensive babies were reportedly born in the opium-producing areas of Yunnan with an in-built addiction and, in the city of Kweichow, the local chamber of commerce adopted opium as the official standard of exchange.
With the warlords submitting to Kuomintang authority, it looked as if matters might change for the better. The Criminal Code of 1928 prohibited the sale, possession, importation and exportation of opium and its derivatives. Under the code, drug traffickers were liable for the death penalty. A Chinese Central Commission for the Suppression of Opium was appointed in 1936 and passed a decision to abolish poppy cultivation gradually. Provision was made for the building of hospitals and hospices for opium addicts, with more than 100 being opened within a year. They were desperately needed if opium was to be stamped out for it was conservatively estimated there were 3,500,000 registered addicts in China. How many unregistered sufferers there were beggars the imagination.
Regardless of the progress made by Britain and other countries over the opium trade, China was still bedevilled by the extraterritorial rights of foreigners who resided in foreign concessions and in such enclaves as Portuguese Macau, British Hong Kong and the extensive foreign quarters in Shanghai where Chinese authority could not be brought to bear.
Of these, Macau was notorious. It had always had a raffish atmosphere but this was magnified by opium which was openly prepared in large amounts for smoking in the many opium dens where smokers indulged their habits on four- or five-tiered bunks like, it was said, racks of loaves in a bakery. So plentiful were these dens, and so easily accessed, they were regarded as worthy of sightseeing and featured on tourist itineraries.
As with the morphine trade, the Japanese were a particular obstacle to opium control and their concessions in Hankow and Tientsin were specifically opprobrious. After the Japanese took control of Manchuria in 1931, they became the main supplier of heroin down the China coast. In the 1930s, Japan earned over $300 million a year from the distribution and sale of Manchurian opium and heroin. The Japanese had a reason for being involved in narcotics smuggling into China. For centuries, the two countries had been enemies and the Japanese were only too aware how effective narcotics were as a social weapon. When, after more than a decade of antagonism, this animosity finally erupted into the Sino-Japanese War of 1937, Japan had already undermined a section of Chinese society.
Not only officials were corrupted by opium. Even Empress Wan Jung, also known as Elizabeth and wife of the tenth and last Ch’ing emperor, Hsuan Tung, known as Henry Pu Yi, was eventually heavily addicted to opium which she had first smoked at the age of nineteen, originally supplied by the Japanese in Tientsin. Her addiction was used for propaganda by the Japanese, her butler being their spy, keeping his masters fully informed. In the year from 10 July 1938, she smoked 740 ounces of what she termed ointment for the increase of longevity. At about 2 ounces a day, this was a heavy dosage, lethal to any non-habituated smoker. She might have been Empress of China but not for her were there ivory and jade pipes: she used whatever cheap instruments she could have purchased for her in the market place. Her death, when it came in June 1946, was directly attributable to opium. Imprisoned by the Communist Chinese forces, she was locked in a cell in Kirin where, prevented from receiving opium, she went into withdrawal. Her companion, Hiro Saga, a distant relative of the Japanese royal family, described her dying days. As Communist soldiers and curious peasants filed chattering and laughing past her cell door to get a glimpse of her, she screamed for opium to such an extent the other prisoners yelled for her to be put down so they might have some peace. When not screaming for opium, she begged for it from the sightseers or her guards and hallucinated that she was back in the Forbidden City, calling out for servants to run her a bath or fetch her food. Her cell was messed with her own urine, excrement and vomit into which she sank for periods of unconsciousness. The guards refused to feed her, wash her or even enter the filth of her cell. She died of malnutrition and the effects of opium withdrawal.
The Sino-Japanese War badly disrupted any drive against opium. Social administration was in upheaval and the addict hospitals were given over to wounded troops. The Japanese flooded China with opium, morphine and cocaine in a systematic attempt to create new addicts and to encourage former ones to rehabituate. Aware of the potential harm it could cause, they also widely reinstated poppy farming in areas they occupied.
Muriel Lester, writing in the Manchester Guardian in April 1938, wrote a lengthy personal account of the opium situation:
In the old Japanese concession [of Tientsin] is a street in which about 50 per cent of the houses are drug ‘joints’. They are not allowed to sell to the Japanese, but foreigners and Chinese, men and women, are offered the stuff openly as they walk through the street.
In Peking I spent a morning visiting various drug ‘joints’. There are plenty of them … The Japanese are no longer allowed to carry on this trade. The drug shops are all left in charge of Koreans under Japanese protection, but Chinese police arrest any Chinese trafficker whom they find. Death is the penalty … We were able to buy as much as we liked, but our usual purchase
was only twenty cents worth … Small boys were on the look-out for customers and led us genially along the hutongs [back alleyways]. A middle-aged procurer took us to a brothel where we purchased heroin … A Chinese trafficker looked very frightened when we appeared. The difference between his furtive expression and the self-assurance of all the Korean dealers was marked …
The thing that troubled me most in Peking was the number of small clinics which the Japanese are opening. They are well lit and attractive. One of them displays the red cross … They advertise in the papers the various diseases which they cure. The procedure in many of them seems to be that each person on entering is given a cursory examination by an unqualified doctor or dispenser, and is then registered as suffering from some specific disease. After that he is allowed to buy as much heroin or morphine as he likes … Three hundred addicts were set free from the city treatment centre last week and the place was closed down. There is no longer any clinic available here for the cure of addicts. Some Japanese here are known to pay their [Chinese] servants or business employees half in cash, half in drugs.
A foreign Christian appealed to five Koreans newly settled in a Chinese town and running opium dens. ‘Why do you come to China?’ he inquired. ‘We were sent here,’ they answered. ‘Why do you ply this trade?’ he asked. ‘That was the part assigned to us,’ they explained.
Apart from traditional opium smoking, Chinese addicts began to experiment with opiate cocktails, including heroin. Margaret Goldsmith, in her 1939 volume, The Trail of Opium, published a list of items which could be purchased in opium shops in Tientsin just before the Second World War. It consisted of heroin smoked with cigarettes, White Powder (also smoked with cigarettes), Yellow Powder (similar to white powder, but for smokers with a more advanced craving), Sweet Pills (also called Golden Pills, smoked with a pipe), k’uai shang k’uai (translating as ‘Quick up Quick’ and smoked with a pipe), paper rolls (impregnated paper rubbed between the palms), Black Plaster (the dust of which was scraped off and smoked with cigarettes), opium, morphine and cocaine.
From the late 1920s, through the 1930s and the upheaval of the Sino-Japanese and the Second World Wars, despite some official measures, in practice opium was given a more or less free rein in China. The Kuomintang authorities, which had been headed by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek since Sun Yat-sen’s death in 1925, were busy trying to unify China, fight the Japanese, woo the British and Americans and fend off the Communist forces of Mao Zedong. Yet their preoccupation with politics and military matters was not the only reason for opium’s freedom. Chiang Kai-shek and his administration were themselves heavily dependent upon opium revenue. Chiang had had his early political career bankrolled by an infamous Shanghai gangster called Tu Yueh-sheng, also known as Big-eared Tu, who ran the Green Gang, a large, particularly well-organised and ruthless Chinese secret criminal fraternity. Tu owned extensive poppy-growing interests in Chekiang and Kiangsu provinces and controlled most, if not all, of the opium trade along the Yangtze River and in Shanghai itself, a major opium trade hub.
Throughout his time in China, before he fled to Taiwan upon losing the country to the Communists, Chiang Kai-shek had an ambiguous relationship with opium. What the Japanese did not do to China with opium, he did.
Chiang Kai-shek knew if he controlled opium, he could fund his army. In 1927, the finance ministry organised an official opium monopoly, facetiously entitled the National Anti-Opium Bureau. Things went well until the monopoly was extended to Big-eared Tu’s opium-growing regions. Here Tu’s opium-handling company, the Da Gong Si, held sway. Within a fortnight, the Nationalist government cancelled the monopoly and closed the anti-opium bureau.
The international outcry which accompanied this move forced Chiang Kai-shek, who was keen to develop relations with the West, to reinstate the bureau as the National Opium Suppression Committee. Chiang Kai-shek announced grandiloquently: ‘The National government will not attempt to get one cent from the opium tax. It would not be worthy of your confidence if it should be found to make an opium tax one of its chief sources of revenue.’
It was a charade.
Words, like human life, were cheap for Chiang Kai-shek. The following year, 1929, his government took $17 million in what was euphemistically termed ‘opium prohibition revenue’. To add insult to injury T.V. Soong, one of the wealthiest men in China and the Harvard-educated Finance Minister, purchased 700 chests of Persian opium through Big-eared Tu in 1930 to supplement a temporary shortage in home product, using Kuomintang soldiers to off-load and guard it in Shanghai. Soong took a hefty commission.
That was not all. In 1931, Chiang Kai-shek struck a deal with Big-eared Tu. Tu’s Green Gang would be afforded government protection in all aspects of opium, have a veto over the appointment of government opium officials and take a large percentage of the earnings in exchange for a down-payment to the treasury of $6 million against forthcoming profits. In the long run, the deal fell through but the intentions behind it were plain. Tu controlled opium and therefore Chiang Kai-shek. To err on the side of caution though, Big-eared Tu lived in the French concession in Shanghai, safe from Chinese law.
Tu was also an opium and morphine addict and, later, he became a heroin addict. Further, he was the main heroin producer in China where it was available as pills and tablets for swallowing or pink pills for smoking. Yet his infamy extended well beyond Shanghai and Chinese politics.
Over 50 per cent of Big-eared Tu’s heroin was exported to France through official channels. The police force in the French concession was administered from Vietnam, then French Indo-China. The captain of police, Étienne Fiori, was a Corsican and a representative of the Union Corse, the Corsican equivalent of the Sicilian Mafia. With French Consul-General Koechlin, he was beholden to Big-eared Tu who paid both the diplomat and the police captain hefty bribes in addition to providing them with concubines. On Tu’s behalf, Fiori assisted in setting up his distribution route to France. Heroin, manufactured by Tu in Shanghai, was shipped to Paris via Hanoi, Saigon and Marseilles. Tu paid a substantial part of his profits to key civil servants and politicians in France to ensure the French government kept its inquisitive nose out of Shanghai.
This protection did not last long, despite Tu increasing his Parisian bribe level and sending as his undercover emissary Mme Wellington Koo, wife of China’s representative at the Treaty of Versailles negotiations. The French government was not for turning. Fiori and Koechlin had let down and possibly double-crossed Tu. In 1933, both were poisoned at a farewell banquet before retiring to France. Koechlin died in extreme pain (along with a few other misfortunates who shared his serving dish) whilst Fiori was ill for months, his health broken.
The Farmers Bank of China, colloquially known amongst expatriate Europeans as the Opium Farmers’ Bank, was inaugurated in the same year. Chiang Kai-shek was closely involved in it and used it for his private banking transactions. A conduit for heroin and opium revenue, it issued its own currency notes, Chiang increasing the print run when his funds ran low. The reserves were never audited nor the books opened for inspection.
Perhaps the greatest public irony of all was Chiang Kai-shek’s fiftieth birthday present from Big-eared Tu. For several years, aware China needed to be strong to defend itself (and his way of life), Tu had spent millions of dollars purchasing American fighter aircraft to build up the air force. On an auspicious day in 1936, Tu presented Chiang Kai-shek with an aircraft bearing the name Opium Suppression of Shanghai on its nose. The hypocrisy and arrogance of the two men were staggering. A poetical expatriate witticism of the time went:
A way at last has now been found
To get opium suppression off the ground.
By the end of the 1930s, it was estimated 10 per cent of the Chinese nation (about 40 million people) were opium addicts, the Japanese occupation during the Sino-Japanese and Second World Wars not significantly reducing the figures: it was in Japan’s interest to keep as many Chinese as possible habituated. In Shanghai, even aft
er the privations of the latter conflict, opium was readily available to all levels of society. Opium poppy growing at the time was still so common as to be found in the suburbs of Canton. Domestic production and importation continued unabated until 1949 when, after four years of bitter civil war, the Kuomintang army was defeated by the Communists.
Within months of assuming control, in February 1950, the Communist government State Administrative Council banned poppy growing, the production, importation and sale of opium and all narcotics. Only a required quantity of licit medicinal opium was produced under rigorous control.
This ban was comparatively easily conducted for China went through massive land reforms. Landlords were displaced (or beheaded), the peasants put in control of agricultural production, communes established and cash crops replaced by food. Communist oratory, a vital aspect of mass ideological education, attacked opium and poppy growing as an imperialist plot which, in a sense, it was. Local cadres, responsible for the presentation of political theory at grass-roots level, were not only able to preach the anti-opium creed: they were also able to pinpoint local opium vendors, addicts and poppy growers.
Opium stocks were publicly burned, divans were destroyed, dealers were either killed or sent for ‘political re-education’ in labour camps. Poppy fields were burnt and ploughed. Pipes were publicly destroyed. Opium taking was listed officially as unhealthy, anti-social, anti-socialist and a capitalist activity. Addicts were not condemned for their vice but offered medical help and rehabilitation centres were set up. Those who were antagonistic towards treatment were sent to labour camps whilst those who re-addicted or were intransigent were paraded before the public as criminals and imprisoned.
Between 1949 and 1953, the addict population dramatically shrank. By 1960, China was virtually free of drug addiction. Anyone dealing in opium was summarily executed, often without the inconvenience and expense of a trial. In 1971, China produced exactly 100 tonnes of raw opium, precisely its medicinal requirement.