Smoking Opium in China: A Selection from Taras Grescoe’s Shanghai Grand (2017)

“Opium isn’t evil, any more than alcohol is evil. There was evil, however, in introducing an addictive narcotic to an impoverished society at a time of extreme social distress. Like the sale of rum and whisky that had such lethal effects on aboriginal cultures, the wholesaling of opium to China was a crime of empire—and one of modern history’s lesser known crimes against humanity.

Yangtu had been part of Chinese society long enough—for at least two centuries, when the palace eunuchs in Peking became the first aficionados—that its use had been ritualized among the upper classes, who looked at it as little more than a strong tipple. Opium pipes were offered at weddings, and among businessmen ‘let’s light the lamps’ was a synonym for ‘let’s talk business.’ (The cabin boys on many steamers on the Yangtze offered passengers a choice of tea or opium.) For China as a whole, though, it acted as a slow poison.

Opium made a once self-sufficient civilization, facing overpopulation and underemployment, dependent—economically as well as physically—on a product imported from abroad. For the poor (and most Chinese at the time were unimaginably poor), it extended the cycle of poverty to infinity. When the only relief from back-breaking and demeaning labour engenders sloth and further impoverishes the wage-earner, as well as his or her extended family, a citizenry has been transformed into a mass of helpless victims.”—Taras Grescoe, Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love, Intrigue, and Decadence in Old China (2017)