Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘The art of alchemists, sex and court ladies’
- 2 As the empire changed hands
- 3 ‘The age of calicoes and tea and opium’
- 4 ‘A hobby among the high and the low in officialdom’
- 5 Taste-making and trendsetting
- 6 The political redefinition of opium consumption
- 7 Outward and downward ‘liquidation’
- 8 ‘The volume of smoke and powder’
- 9 ‘The unofficial history of the poppy’
- 10 Opiate of the people
- 11 The road to St Louis
- 12 ‘Shanghai vice’
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - ‘The age of calicoes and tea and opium’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘The art of alchemists, sex and court ladies’
- 2 As the empire changed hands
- 3 ‘The age of calicoes and tea and opium’
- 4 ‘A hobby among the high and the low in officialdom’
- 5 Taste-making and trendsetting
- 6 The political redefinition of opium consumption
- 7 Outward and downward ‘liquidation’
- 8 ‘The volume of smoke and powder’
- 9 ‘The unofficial history of the poppy’
- 10 Opiate of the people
- 11 The road to St Louis
- 12 ‘Shanghai vice’
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The eighteenth century has been described as ‘the age of calicoes and tea and opium’. By the eighteenth century opium-as-aphrodisiac could no longer be kept as a court or elite luxury and tobacco as ‘the opiate of the people’. This chapter examines opium's introduction to a different level of society, its entry into mainstream sex recreation and the consumer vanguard. Many historians have emphasised the pathological effect of opium on the eve of the first Opium War (1839–42), but no one has explained under what circumstances it became pathological. Some conveniently point towards the previous century. But what is it about the previous reigns that contributed to the outbreak of opium smoking? It took time for the medicine-to-aphrodisiac intelligence to spread. It also took time for opium to become widely available. Above all, assimilation had to develop within the larger framework of existing Chinese cultures of consumption. The eighteenth century was a period when knowledge about opium was passed on to many people (in other words, accumulated and socialised). China's political and genealogical intimacy with south-east Asia in general, and with Taiwan in particular, was to play an important role. Sojourners to and from south-east Asia and participants of the Taiwan conquest both came back to the mainland with habits and memories of smoking. This was fundamental to the spread of opium, which involved not only maritime trade and what Chris Bayly called ‘archaic globalisation’ but also the wider Chinese diaspora and mechanisms of culture transmission.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Social Life of Opium in China , pp. 41 - 55Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005