China’s Unofficial Opium Story

by Ernie Diaz

Official history usually promotes a theme, rather than understanding. Regarding the history of opium in China, the official line is correct, but by no means thorough. Yes, England bankrolled its empire-building on the sale of opium to China. Resistance culminated in 1839, when Emperor Daoguang dispatched an official to hold a Boston Tea Party, dumping 20,000 chests of the drug overboard. England concluded the resulting Opium War in possession of Hong Kong and treaty-ports in what today are Mainland China’s great coastal cities. China was left facing a century of humiliation, a period that colors its people’s attitudes and foreign policy to this day.

But that’s all social studies. Any expat with an ear for the past has heard of the rampant drug abuse in China during its subjugation, particularly as part of the excesses of pre-WWII Shanghai. And only the uneducated or incurious (usually the same people) swallow whole the theory that millions of people could succumb to drug addiction solely through the avaricious scheming of a foreign agent.

Unsurprisingly, China’s relationship with opium is older than its relationship with Great Britain. The following is no apologia for England’s drug-foisting on China, only a brief survey meant to fill in some of the many blank spaces left by official stories.

The China Year Book of 1916 reports that “The poppy has been known in China for twelve centuries, and its medicinal use for nine.” Twelfth century Li Gao, known as the ‘magic doctor’ wrote a medical text, Shiwu Bencao, prescribing opium tinctures as a sovereign remedy for diarrhea, sunstroke, asthma, and numerous other ailments. The drug received similar praise from thirteenth century court physician Wei Yilin, proving both that the poppy could be a friend in times of need, and another case of Chinese discovery preceding Western by hundreds of years.

Ironically, it would be spiritual enthusiasm that led the Chinese from medicinal to recreational use of opium. Taoist science ranked high among the many refinements popular with Ming officials. One Taoist practice regarded as especially beneficial was the act of copulating without consummation, in order to boost the vital energies. Opium was known as a valuable agent in helping one cultivate the control so easily lost in the process.

By the middle of the Ming Dynasty, opium was not referred to as yaoso often as chun yao, spring medicine, a typically poetic term for ‘aphrodisiac’. Apparently the royalty had need for spring medicine, as 1483 was a year significant only for a Ming court rife with sex scandals, according to Shen Difu’s history:

“Chenghua’s reign was soaked in decadence; all attendant on his court fell into obsessions of the flesh. With Wan An and Lady Wan in the court, the habits were rotten to the core. Wan presented chunyao to the Emperor and the Imperial Censor. Ni Jinxian presented it to Wan. The Capital Censor Li Shi and the Supervising Censor Zhang Shan passed on secret sex formulas, and they both got their old jobs back.”

By the late Ming, opium was no longer the province of royal dabbling but a court necessity, and was working its way into the commoners’ purview. As Li Shizhen revealed in his 1578 Compendium of Medicines, “…it can help control the essence of men; ordinary people use it for the art of sex. Beijing has the golden panacea for sale.” As for royal habits, the 1587 edition of Da Ming Huidian, Collected Statutes of the Great Ming, records that the Siamese presented 200 jin (100 kilos) of opium to the Ming Emperor and 100 jin to his empress. Other vassal states were offering the drug as tribute, while eunuchs were sent abroad to procure it with gold.

The Qing were not as taken with chasing the dragon as their antecessors. Foreign opium was introduced for the first time not by the British, but by Portuguese merchants from Goa at the beginning of the 18^th century. By 1729, import was up to 200 chests, prompting Emperor Yung Qing to issue the first anti-opium edict, imposing severe penalties on both the sale of the opium and the opening of shops where it could be smoked.

decapitated, non-sanctioned opium smugglers

However, through a combination of entrenched opium business interests, significant demand, and weak central authority, importation continued to increase, until it was again declared illegal in 1800. But these were the days of the East India Company, and China had no resources with which to deter government-backed British smugglers.

After the Opium Wars, seeing that the opium trade was to be a phenomenon of force majeure, China began planting its own poppies, converting vast tracts of grain fields and diverting rich river bottoms to the cultivation of opium. The operation doubled the supply and dropped the price so that even the poorest could afford a taste.

The prevalence of opium use as a facet of daily life in China was enough to cause Dr. Nathan Allen to comment, in his 1853 book “The Opium Trade”,

“The use of opium has become so universal among the people of China, that the laws which render it penal, and the proclamations which send forth their daily fulminations against its continuance, have not the slightest effect in checking the prevalence of so general a habit. Smoking houses abound in Canton; and the inhabitants of every class who can furnish themselves with the means to obtain the pipe, are seldom without this article of general luxury. It is a propensity that has seized upon all ranks and classes, and is generally on the increase.”

Speaking of Fuzhou, he claims, “not less than one half of the male population of that city are more or less enslaved to the use of opium.”

Although foreigners were the importers and primary beneficiaries of drug trafficking, there is no imagining that the Chinese were addicted in such numbers without their own engaged in the business. Again Dr. Allen provides some insight with this comment, “It is now rare to meet a native who is not himself engaged in its purchase, or whose opposition to it is not disarmed by the knowledge that it is the daily business of his friends and relatives.”

The opium-smoking milieu had fallen far from cultivated Ming courts. Speaking of the “more than one thousand” smoking shops of Guangdong, Dr. Allen describes them as “the most miserable and wretched places imaginable.” Evidently he had some eyewitness experience, for he describes a typical shop at length:

“They are kept open day and night, each being furnished with a greater or less number of bedsteads, constructed of bamboo-spars, and covered with dirty mats and rattans. The shop-keeper attends on his customers, serving them with a pipe, the prepared drug and other implements used in smoking.”

He goes on to quote Reverend Squire, a missionary who did much of his proselytizing in opium dens. “Never, perhaps, was there a nearer approach to hell upon earth, than within the precincts of these vile hovels, where gaming is likewise carried on to great extent. Here every gradation of excitement and depression may be witnessed.”

Squares wondering how poppy powder could so allure an ostensibly rational person may be enlightened by Mr. Tiffany, who in his 19^th century work “Canton Chinese” gives a sketch of a typical opium smoker:

“The victim inhales his allotted quantity and his senses swim around him, he feels of subtle nature, he floats from earth as if on pinions. He would leave his humble station, his honest toil; he would be great. He runs with ease the paths of distinction; he distances rivals; wealth and power wait upon him, the mighty takes him by the hand. He is no longer poor, lowly and despised, but a demigod.”

Despite the lack of public service announcements, few were deceived as to the pernicious price paid for such reveries. A writer in the Chinese Repository for 1836, comparing the effects of liquor to opium, had this to say of the latter:

“There is no slavery on earth, to be compared with the bondage into which opium casts its victim. It is the secondary effects of this drug which have such a destructive influence on the constitution. Its continued use destroys the natural appetite – deranges the digestive organs, and vitiates the quality of the blood, depresses the spirits, and gradually weakens the power of the involuntary nerves as well as the volitions of the mind. How expressive the remark once made by a distinguished mandarin: It is not the man who eats opium, but it is opium that eats the man.”

Secretary of an 1876 Japanese legation to Beijing, Takezoe, was alarmed enough by opium’s grip on China to report, “It is in the nature of opium to consume the energies of the smoker and shorten his life. This poison is worse than venom. I fear that in another one hundred years’ time the four hundred millions of China will be utterly enervated and the race will approach extinction.”

A miraculous step towards a national dry-out came in 1906. The Guangxu Emperor, desperate to convince increasingly rebellious subjects that he, too, was unselfishly committed to ending foreign oppression, issued an edict that in ten years’ time all opium traffic must cease. For complex socio-political reasons, Great Britain complied with a proportional decrease in Indian opium imports. But if kicking is hard for one addict, how much more so for a nation financially dependent on drug demand.

The early 20^th century was a time of drug reform in the West also, but these reforms ultimately exacerbated China’s opium problems. America made opium and its derivatives illegal under the 1914 Harrison Act, as did Great Britain in 1920, with the Dangerous Drugs Act. After WWI, the League of Nations took on the task of global drug control through its Opium Advisory Committee. The committee’s 1924 convention produced an agreement to regulate the international drug trade, but to allow domestic monopolies to keep running for another fifteen years.

These international controls increased the cost of doing opium business in China, leading to the advent of cheaper, more potent morphine, as well as new depths of corruption and violence in the smuggling trade. Just as with Prohibition in the United States, strict prohibition in China of a popular, if detrimental, commodity led to a rise in organized crime, to fill the vacuum and reap the increased profits of an increasingly rare drug.

Writing of 1920s Shanghai, Brian Martin noted, “Prohibition encouraged the growth of a vast, illicit traffic that provided an economic basis for the development of organized crime in the major cities, and helped define the ways in which criminal organizations interacted with the world of politics.”

Shanghai godfathers Pock-face Huang (left) and Big Ears Du (right)

In Shanghai’s Roaring Twenties, the underground met the overlords at two human points of contact: Huang ‘Pock-face” Jinrong, senior Chinese constable for the local French gendarmerie, and Du ‘Big Ears’ Yuesheng, head of the Green Gang triad. It was they who, through their rigorous taxing and regulation of virtually all opium trade in China, kept Shanghai a viable Gomorrah, factory-size brothels, posh gambling palaces, and all other manner of vice coexisting without crumbling into complete chaos.

As for their political interaction, it is well known that the upstart, unstable Kuomintang state derived much of its revenues through opium trade profits, as well as obtaining intelligence and muscle from organized crime entities such as the Green Gang. Historian Timothy Brook argues that the occupying Japanese infiltrated and fostered the Chinese opium trade for revenue, as did Chinese strongmen during the Warlord Era, and even a certain party whose acronym begins with the third letter of the alphabet repeated twice.

Whatever governmental entities profited from the opium trade, the Communist Party was inarguably the catalyst for China’s cold turkey program, launching two swift and merciless opium suppression campaigns in 1950 and 1952. We may never know how many addicts were rehabilitated with a bullet, or how many opium dealers and profiteers were summarily convicted, then retired with extreme prejudice. There is no doubt, however, that the campaign kicked China’s habit; not until the 1990s was there even the vaguest public glimmer of yearning to once again chase the dragon. But that’s an unofficial story for another time.

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