Chapter XXXVIII: The Opium Poppy and Its Use57

My acquaintance with the opium poppy began in the month of February on the journey from Wan Hsien to Paoning Fu. It is a very handsome plant. It is expensive to grow. It has to be attended to eight times, and needs heavy manuring. It is exposed to so many risks before the juice is secured that the growth is much of a speculation, and many Chinese regard it as being as risky as gambling. Besides its cultivation for sale, on a majority of farms it is grown for home use, as tobacco is, for smoking. It is a winter crop, and is succeeded by rice, maize, cotton, beans, etc. Certain crops can be planted between the rows of the poppies. Much oil, bearing a high price, is made from the seed. The lower leaves, which are abundant, are used in some quarters to feed pigs, and also as a vegetable. They were served up to me as such twice, and tasted like spinach. In some places the heavy stalks are dug into the ground; in others they are used as fuel, and after serving this purpose their ashes provide lye for the indigo dyers. It appears from much concurrent testimony, that in spite of heavy manuring the crop exhausts the ground.

The area devoted to the poppy in SZE CHUAN is enormous, and owing to the high price of the drug and its easy transport its culture is encroaching on the rice and arable lands. The consequences of the extension of its cultivation are serious. It is admitted by the natives of SZE CHUAN that one great reason of the deficient food supply which led to the famine and distress in the eastern part of the province in 1897, was the giving of so much ground to the poppy that there was no longer a margin left on which to feed the population in years of a poor harvest.

I shall not touch on the history of the growth and use of opium in China. The authorities evidently regarded the introduction of both as a grave peril, and they were prohibited under Imperial decrees. I learn on what I regard as very reliable authority, that sixty years ago, when Cantonese brought opium cough pills into KWEICHOW and YUNNAN, and the consumers found themselves unable to give up the medicine, that the authorities were most active in suppressing its use, and even inflicted the punishment of death on many of the refractory in YUNNAN. It was then and later smuggled about the country in coffins!

Now, on many of the SZE CHUAN roads opium houses are as common as gin shops in our London slums. I learned from Chinese sources that in several of the large cities of the province eighty per cent. of the men and forty per cent. of the women are opium smokers; but this must not be understood to mean that they are opium “wrecks,” for there is a vast amount of “moderate” opium smoking in China. In my boat on the Yangtze fourteen out of sixteen very poor trackers smoked opium, and among my chair and baggage coolies it was rare to find one who did not smoke, and who did not collapse about the same hour daily with the so-called unbearable craving.

The stern of my boat was a downright opium den at night, with fourteen ragged men curled up on their quilts, with their opium lamps beside them, in the height of sensuous felicity, dreaming such Elysian dreams as never visit the toiling day of a Chinese coolie, and incapable of rousing themselves to meet an emergency until the effect of the pipe passed off. Farther astern still, the _lao-pan_ and his shrieking virago of a wife lay in the same blissful case, the toothless, mummied face of the _lao-pan_, expressive in the daytime of nothing but fiendish greed, with its muscles relaxed, and its deep, hard lines smoothed out. Some of these men, whose thin, worn, cotton rags were ill-fitted to meet the cold, sold most of them at Wan, rather than undergo what appeared to be literally the _agonies_ of abstinence. On my inland journey I heard incidentally of many men who had sold both wives and children in order to obtain the drug, and at Paoning Fu of a man and his wife who, having previously parted with house, furniture, and all they had, to gratify their craving, at the time of my visit sold their only child, a nice girl of fourteen, educated in the Mission School, to some brutal Kansuh fur traders, who were returning home. It is quite usual when a man desires a house and land which are the property of an opium smoker, for him to wait with true Chinese patience for one, two, or three years, certain that the owner will sooner or later part with it for an old song to satisfy his opium craving when he has sold all else. It is common for the Chinese to say, “If you want to be revenged on your enemy you need not strike him, or go to law with him—you have only to entice him into smoking opium.”

The Chinese condemn all but most moderate opium smoking and gambling as twin vices, and not a voice is raised in defence of either of them, even by the smokers themselves. The opium habit is regarded as a disease, for the cure of which many smokers voluntarily place themselves in opium refuges at some expense, and at a great cost of suffering, and in the market towns, thronged with native traders, there is to be seen on many stalls among innumerable native drugs and commodities, a package labelled “Remedy for Foreign Smoke,” “foreign smoke” being the usual name for opium in Western China. I was impressed with the existence of a curious sort of conscience, if it can be called such, among the devotees of opium, which leads them to consider themselves as moral criminals. The Chinese generally believe that if a man takes to the opium habit it will be to the impoverishment and ruin of his family, and that it will prevent him from fulfilling one of the first of Confucian obligations, the support of his parents in their old age. The consensus of opinion among smokers and non-smokers, as to the crime of opium smoking and its woeful results, leads me to believe that it brings about the impoverishment and ruin of families to an enormous extent. Chinese said several times to me that the reason the Japanese beat them was that they were more vigorous men, owing to the rigid exclusion of opium from Japan.

In May I saw the crop harvested. Women and children are the chief operators. In the morning longitudinal incisions are made in the seed vessel, the juice exudes, and by the evening is hard enough to be scraped into cups, after which it turns black, and after a few days’ exposure is ready for packing. Heavy rain or a strong west wind during this process is very injurious. Maize, tobacco, and cotton have been previously planted, and make a good appearance as soon as the poppy stalks have been cleared away.

Eight years ago it was rather exceptional for women and children to smoke, but the Chinese estimate that in SZE CHUAN and other opium-producing regions from forty to sixty per cent. are now smokers. Where opium is not grown the habit is chiefly confined to the cities, but it is rapidly spreading.

Its existence is obvious among the lower classes from the exceeding poverty which it entails. Millions of the working classes earn barely enough to provide them with what, even to their limited notions, are the necessaries of life, and the money spent on opium is withdrawn from these. Hence the confirmed opium smoker among the poor is apt to look half starved and ragged. Still I am bound to say that I did not encounter any of those awful specimens of physical wreckage that I saw some years ago in the Malay States from the same cause.

Among the well-to-do and well-nourished classes the evils of opium are doubtless more moral than physical; among the masses both evils are combined. The lower orders of officials and “_yamen_ runners,” with their unlimited leisure, are generally smokers. Among my official escorts in SZE CHUAN, numbering in all 143 men, all but two were devotees of opium, and I was constantly delayed and inconvenienced by it. My coolies frequently broke down under the craving, and that at times as inconvenient to themselves as to me. In two towns I had to wait two hours to get my passport copied because the writers at the _yamen_ were in the blissful haziness produced by the pipe.

So far as I have seen, the passionate craving for the drug, called by the Chinese the “_Yin_,” (which appears to be the coming on of severe depression after the stimulant of the pipe has passed off), involves great suffering, and total abstinence, whether voluntary or enforced, produces an anguish which the enfeebled will of the immoderate smoker is powerless to contend with. The craving grows, till at the end of eighteen months from the commencement of the habit, or even less, the smoker, unless he can gratify it, becomes unable to do his work.

He feels disinclined to move, miserable all over, especially at the stomach and between the shoulders, his joints and bones ache badly, he perspires freely, he trembles with a sense of weakness, and if he cannot get the drug, he believes that he will die. I cannot learn how soon a man comes to consider himself a victim of the habit. Those who place themselves in opium refuges with the hope of cure, endure agonies which they describe to be “as if wolves were gnawing at their vitals,” and would, if permitted, tear off their skin to relieve the severe internal suffering.

On my SZE CHUAN journey we were benighted on a desolate hillside, and had to spend the night in the entrance to a coal-pit, cold, wet, and badly fed. My coolies had relied on being able to buy opium, and though they were comparatively moderate smokers, they suffered so much that some of them were rolling on the ground in their pain. Dr. Main, of Hangchow, thinks that very few can be cured in opium refuges, which they enter for twenty-one days, for the debility, stomachic disorder, and depression which follow the disuse of the drug are so great, that six months of tonics and good feeding would be necessary to set them on their feet again. On the contrary, the poor wretch, low in purse, depressed, feeble, trembling, leaves the shelter of the refuge to be tempted at once to a smoke by old associates, while in cities like Hangchow and Fuchow from eight hundred to a thousand registered opium shops display their seductions, and he turns aside to the only physical and mental comfort that he knows.

I have little doubt that in the early months of the habit there is a widespread desire to abandon it. Opium refuges, in spite of the fair payment which is asked for, are always crowded. The shops and markets abound in native and foreign remedies for “foreign smoke.” The native cures all contain opium, chiefly in the form of ashes, and the foreign, which are white, contain morphia. The attempts at self-cure number tens of thousands, and are very piteous, but in many cases it is merely the exchange of the opium habit for the morphia habit, and at this time morphia lozenges are making great headway in China, as an easy and unsuspected means, specially in travelling, of obtaining the sensations which have become essential to existence. The importation of morphia into China is now enormous—135,283 ounces in 1898. It is sold everywhere, and in the great west, as well as nearer the seaboard, shops are opened which sell a few articles as a blind, for the lucrative sale of the much-prized morphia pill or lozenge. Among the native cures which I have heard of the only one which seems at all efficacious is the so-called “Tea Extract,” _Scutellaria vicidula_. The _Jsai li_ sect, which makes abstinence from opium one of its tenets, uses this cure invariably, but the ordinary smoker is unwilling to face the severe suffering which it entails.

Smokers, I have learned, may be divided into three classes: first, the upper class, not driven by failure of means or sense of duty to abandon an indulgence which they can well afford, and which they do not enjoy to excess; second, the respectable class of small merchants, innkeepers, shopkeepers, business men, and the like, who find their families pinched and themselves losing caste by reason of their habit; third, the class—which the Chinese estimate to consist of forty per cent. of the whole in the cities, and twenty per cent. in the country—which has drifted beyond hope, and is continually recruited from those above it. In this are found thieves, beggars, actors, the infamous, the lost and submerged, the men who have sold lands, houses, wives, and children, and live for opium only, much as the most degraded of our dipsomaniacs live for spirits.

Besides these, there are many who are not obliged to have recourse to selling and pawning to get along, but who curtail such things as the education of their children, and flowers for their wives’ heads, and who, from having eaten meat twice daily, eat it only once, or substitute for it a purely vegetable diet, which must contain much honey and sugar to relieve the heat and dryness of the mouth which the pipe produces. Then there are large numbers of smokers who have barely enough to feed themselves upon, who must eat in order to work, and who have not one _cash_ left for opium. These borrow right and left, and part with all they can pledge for anything, borrowing every year from fresh lenders, and paying back a fraction of the old debts till they can borrow no longer, and drop into the submerged class aforesaid. Among these are seen the ragged, mummied wretches, who _kotow_ to former acquaintances, and beg from them the ashes of their opium pipes, even drinking these with hot water to satisfy the craving.

Rich smokers smoke what is known as “Canton opium,” the import from India, which they compare to a coal fire, and the native drug to a wood one. But the manufacture of the latter is improving rapidly; and as it is increasingly used to mix with the Indian, a generation is growing up in the upper class which knows only the mixed drug, and apparently only the old, rich smokers use pure Indian opium, the consumption of which has fallen off enormously, though in 1898 the value of the Indian import was £4,388,385.

The mysteries of the preparation and the varieties of the product baffle the non-smoker. Both Chinese and Indian opium are now largely prepared with the ashes of the drug already once smoked, much of it flowing, only imperfectly burned, into the receiver of the pipe. In the strongest prepared opium, four ounces of ashes of the first degree are added to every ten of crude opium. Ashes of the second and even the third burning are also used. Many of the poorer classes have to content themselves with a smoke of opium ashes only, and the lowest of all users of the drug have to satisfy themselves with eating or drinking the ashes of the third burning.

There is a class which can afford to buy the pure drug, but which finds that it does not satisfy the craving, but this is merged in a far larger one of old and inveterate rich smokers of one tael’s weight per day, who smoke not even the very best prepared Indian drug, for their craving needs far stronger stimulation, but ashes of the first degree. Such men give the prepared extract, weight for weight, value for value, for the ashes, and contract with opium shops to be supplied with all their ashes of the first burning. For the rich, inveterate smoker an ounce of prepared extract is mixed with six ounces of ashes of the first degree. This habit has in Chinese a specific bad name.

Pure opium appears to be seldom sold, as it fails to satisfy the craving of the practised smoker. It is not only that ashes are mixed with the fresh drug, but that they are reboiled, and after being made up with treacle to the proper consistence are resmoked, and their ashes are then eaten by the poorest class.

Morphia, the active principle of opium, not being consumed in the smoke owing to its lack of volatility, the eating of the ashes, which contain seven per cent. and upwards of it, has a very serious effect. The fact that opium is smoked three times makes it impossible to estimate either the quantity consumed or the amount spent on the indulgence, but these are, of course, greatly in excess of that indicated by any possible returns.

Among the adjuncts of opium smoking used by rich smokers is what is called “water tobacco,” supposed erroneously to be all washed in the water of the Yellow river. It is retailed in thin cakes of a brick-red colour, and is said to be mixed with arsenic, and that its excessive use, with or without opium, is dangerous to health.[58] This tobacco is invariably smoked in “water pipes” by the upper classes in SZE CHUAN.

In the chapter on the Hangchow Hospital I have mentioned the impetus given to suicide by the painlessness of death by opium, and will not refer to it again. In this chapter I have only touched upon such mysteries and results of opium smoking as I have seen in my limited experience, or have heard of directly from Chinese through my interpreters, or facts stated in a careful paper, _The Use of Opium_, by Dr. Dudgeon, of Peking. Except for the quotation of a remark of Dr. Main, of Hangchow, on opium refuges, I have not obtained any of my material from missionaries.[59]

From all that I have seen and heard among the Chinese themselves, I have come to believe that even moderate opium smoking involves enormous risks, and that excessive smoking brings in its train commercial, industrial, and moral ruin and physical deterioration, and this on a scale so large as to threaten the national well-being and the physical future of the race.

The most common reasons which the Chinese give for contracting the habit are pain, love of pleasure, sociability, and the want of occupation. They say that a moderate use of the pipe “advances the transaction of business, stimulates the bargaining instinct, facilitates the striking of bargains, and enables men to talk about secret and important matters which without it they would lack courage to speak of.”

It is strangely true that in this industrial nation there are hundreds of thousands of people with little or nothing to do. There are the wives of the wealthy, retired, and expectant mandarins, leisured men of various classes, _literati_ waiting for employment, the great army of priests and monks, and the hangers-on of _yamens_, besides which there are Government officials whose duties occupy them only one day in a month. These remarks apply chiefly to urban populations.

Outside of commercial pursuits an overpowering shadow of dulness rests on Chinese as upon much of Oriental life. The lack of an enlightened native press, and of anything deserving the name of contemporary literature; the grooviness of thought and action; the trammels of a rigid etiquette; the absence of athletics, and even of ordinary exercise; the paucity of recreations, other than the play and the restaurants, which are ofttimes associated with opium shops and vicious resorts; and the fact that the learned having committed the classics to memory, by which they have rendered themselves eligible for office, have no farther motive for study—all make the blissful dreams and the oblivion of the opium pipe greatly to be desired.

It is obvious that opium has come to “stay.” So lately as 1859, in SZE CHUAN, which now exports opium annually to the value of nearly £2,000,000, the penalty for growing it was death, in spite of which the white poppy fields were seen in conspicuous places along the Great River; and in 1868 an Imperial edict against its cultivation was supplemented by a proclamation to the same effect by the Viceroy of the province, and both have remained dead letters.

At all times the beautiful _Papaver somniferum_ has been regarded as the enemy of China. There are no apologists for the use of opium except among foreigners. The smokers themselves are ashamed of their slavery. All alike condemn it, and regard opium as a curse as well as a vice, and from all which came under my own observation in fifteen months, I fully agree with them.

I will conclude this chapter with a few extracts from officials whose knowledge of the evils which are following the constantly increasing use of the drug, cannot be gainsaid. The first quotation is from the British Consul at Tainan, Formosa. Consul Hirst says:—

“As long as China remains a nation of opium smokers there is not the
least reason to fear that she will become a military power of any
importance, as the habit saps the energies and vitality of the
nation.”

The next is from Consul Bourne, who accompanied the “Blackburn Commission” to the west and south of China, in the winter and spring of 1896–97. Mr. Bourne believes that the provinces of YUNNAN and KUEI-CHOW raise opium annually to the amount of about three millions sterling.

“There is no doubt,” he writes, “that here (Kuei-chow) the officials
tried to stop the cultivation of the poppy, but this must have been
very difficult, because an export such as opium, light in weight for
its value, is just what these provinces, with their wretched means of
communication, want. To-day, without opium, Yunnan and Kuei-chow would
have no means of paying for imports. Unfortunately,” he says, writing
of YUNNAN, “opium has become almost the medium of exchange in this
province, as I explained in a former report.”

Writing on the deplorable condition of YUNNAN (p. 58), he says:—

“After Yang-kai, poppy fills the whole cultivated area, covering the
valley with white and purple (this is in the province of Yunnan), a
gorgeous spectacle to the eye, though not agreeable to the mind, for
one must attribute chiefly to opium, I think, the extraordinary
failure of this province to recover from the devastation of the
rebellion.

“The drug is so cheap and handy that the men almost all smoke, and
most women, especially among the agriculturists, who tend the poppy
and collect and sell the juice—the class that is elsewhere the
backbone of China, if, indeed, China can be said to have a backbone. I
was assured by an English missionary who has long resided in the
province, and in whose judgment I have great confidence, that in
eastern and western circuits (Tao) of the province, which embrace more
than two-thirds of its area, 80 per cent. of the men and 60 per cent.
of the women smoke opium. In the southern circuit the habit is not
quite so general. He had no doubt that the vice had a very bad effect
on the race. At all events, every traveller must be struck by the
great extent to which the fertile valleys—the only land well
cultivated—are monopolised by the poppy; by the apathy and laziness of
the people; and by the very slow recovery, during twenty-five years,
from the losses of the rebellion. Another bad result of opium being so
ready at hand is the frequency of suicides, especially among women.”

At the close of 1898, a book was published by H. E. Chang Chih-tung, who is described by foreigners long resident in China as having been for many years one of the most influential statesmen in the country, and as standing second to no official in the empire for ability, honesty, disinterestedness, and patriotism. He has filled in succession three of the most important Viceroyalties in the empire. He deals with the opium habit as with a huge national evil. Under the heading “The Expulsion of the Poison,” he writes thus:—

(1) “Deplorable indeed is the injury done by opium! It is [as] the
Deluge of the present day or [an invasion of] some fierce beasts, but
the danger [arising from it] is greater than [the danger arising from]
those things.... The injury done by opium is that of a stream of
poison flowing on for more than a hundred years, and diffusing itself
in twenty-two provinces. The sufferers from this injury amount to
untold millions. Its consequences are insidious and seductive, and the
limit has not yet been reached. It destroys men’s abilities, it
weakens the vigour of the soldier, it wastes their wealth,[60] until
it results at length in China being what she is to-day. This
destruction affects the ability of civilians and soldiers alike. The
injury is worse than any waste of wealth. Men’s wills are weakened,
their physical strength is reduced. In the management of business they
lack industry, they cannot journey any distance, their expenditure
becomes extravagant, their children are few. After a few tens of years
it will result in China becoming altogether the laughing-stock of the
world.”

(2) “Shanghai and Yangchow both have associations for breaking off the
opium habit. Their general object may be said to be that each member
should control his dependents. As for the opium smokers, masters will
not employ them as servants, teachers will not have them as scholars,
generals will not take them as soldiers, farmers will not use them as
labourers, merchants will not employ them as assistants, foremen will
not have them for workmen.”

The writer concludes by saying:—

“If Confucius and Mencius were to live again, and were to teach the
empire ... they would certainly begin by [teaching men] to break off
opium.”

How is China to emancipate herself from this rapidly increasing habit, which is threatening to sap the hitherto remarkable energy of the race?