Tobacco--China's First Opium

Bill Brown ... Xiamen University
Today the headline was that Barack Obama lied about his smoking habit. It is ironic that he should have to hide his habit--and that we now criticize China for having more smokers than America has people. America, after all, is largely responsible for China's smoking addiction today. Chinese emperors fought the use of tobacco almost as energetically (and futilely) as they did the opium trade a century later, as we see from excerpts in Blakeslee below:

Blakeslee, George H., Editor, “China and the Far East: Clark University Lectures,” Thomay Y. Crowell and Co., New York, 1910.

p. 157
The rise of the opium-smoking habit in China seems to have followed the introduction of tobacco smoking to that Empire. The tobacco plant had been transplanted by the Spaniards to the Philippine Islands. From here it appears to have been introduced by way of Formosa to Amoy and its neighborhood, in the Province of Fukien. This was towards the end of the Ming Dynasty (1620). 1628-44 were the years of the last Ming Emperor. During this reign the habit of tobacco smoking tended to spread throughout the eastern portion of the Empire. The result was a prohibitory Edict against it. But in vain; the habit could not be checked by law.

The Manchus followed the Mings and in the year 1641 an Edict was again published which prohibited the smoking of tobacco.

The prohibitory Edicts issued by the last Ming and first Manchu seem to have been just as ineffectual against tobacco smoking as were the later Manchu Edicts against opium smoking. During the seventeenth century the spread of the tobacco habit was as rapid and as difficult to control by Edict as the spread of the opium-smoking habit in the nineteenth century. The prohibitory Edicts emanated from Emperors who it cannot be gainsaid were moved by a deep paternal interest in their people. The common sense of the better classes and the propriety of the Confucian mind were shocked by both practices.

In 1729 the Chinese Government found itself face to face with a rapidly spreading and alarming vice. Native opium was being diverted from medicinal uses to pander to an evil. The opium poppy began to flourish all over China, while imports of the Indian drug began to move upward. Alarmed, in 1729, the Emperor issued an Edict prohibiting the sale of opium and the opening of opium divans. The penalties imposed on those who disobeyed were severe, the most important being on the sellers of the drug. In 1730 another Edict was aimed at the practice amongst the Chinese colonists in Formosa.

Since these Edicts were promulgated, it may be said in truth that the ruling authorities of China have steadfastly regarded opium smoking as a crime.

1782 letter of Thomas Fizhugh in China to Mr. Gregory in London: “The importation of opium to China is forbidden under very severe penalties; the opium on seizure is burnt, the vessel in which it is brought to port is confiscated, and the Chinese in whose possession it is found for sale is punishable with death….”

King, in 1911, warned China, and the West, against tobacco.

IX

THE UTILIZATION OF WASTE

OPIUM and TOBACCO

Opium is no longer used openly in China...it is a great misfortune that through the pitiless efforts of the British-American Tobacco Company her people are rapidly becoming addicted to the western tobacco habit, selfish beyond excuse, filthy beyond measure, and unsanitary in its polluting and oxygen destroying effect upon the air all are compelled to breathe. It has already become a greater and more inexcusable burden upon mankind than opium ever was.

China, with her already overtaxed fields, can ill afford to give over an acre to the cultivation of this crop and she should prohibit the growing of tobacco as she has that of the poppy. Let her take the wise step now when she readily may, for all civilized nations will ultimately be compelled to adopt such a measure. The United States in 1902 had more than a million acres growing tobacco, and harvested 821,000,000 pounds of leaf. This leaf depleted those soils to the extent of more than twenty eight million pounds of nitrogen, twenty-nine million pounds of potassium and nearly two and a half million pounds of phosphorus, all so irrecoverably lost that even China, with her remarkable skill in saving and her infinite patience with little things, could not recover them for her soils. On a like area of field might as readily be grown twenty million bushels of wheat and if the twelve hundred million pounds of grain were all exported it would deplete the soil less than the tobacco crop in everything but phosphorus, and in this about the same. Used at home, China would return it all to one or another field. The home consumption of tobacco in the United States averaged seven pounds per capita in 1902. A like consumption for China's four hundred millions would call for 2800 million pounds of leaf. If she grew it on her fields two million acres would not suffice. Her soils would be proportionately depleted and she would be short forty million bushels of wheat; but if China continues to import her tobacco the vast sum expended can neither fertilize her fields nor feed, clothe or educate her people, yet a like sum expended in the importation of wheat would feed her hungry and enrich her soils.

In the matter of conservation of national resources here is one of the greatest opportunities open to all civilized nations. What might not be done in the United States with a fund of $57,000,000 annually, the market price of the raw tobacco leaf, and the land, the labor and the capital expended in getting the product to the men who puff, breathe and perspire the noxious product into the air everyone must breathe, and who bespatter the streets, sidewalks, the floor of every public place and conveyance, and befoul the million spittoons, smoking rooms and smoking cars, all unnecessary and should be uncalled for, but whose installation and upkeep the non-user as well as the user is forced to pay, and this in a country of, for and by the people. This costly, filthy, selfish tobacco habit should be outgrown. Let it begin in every new home, where the mother helps the father in refusing to set the example, and let its indulgence be absolutely prohibited to everyone while in public school and to all in educational institutions.

King, F. H. , D. Sc., “Farmers of Forty Centuries, or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan,” University of Wisconsin, 1911



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