Chapter 12 The Colonial Period 453China that had everything and wished for nothing except possibly acknowledg-
ment of the superiority of the Celestial Empire over every other nation on
earth. Then in the eighteenth century a new product in the form of balls of a
hard, brown resinous substance wrapped in poppy petals and packed 40 to the
crate in Banares and Patna began arriving in Canton. From the beginning Bei-
jing did not like this import and tried to prohibit it as early as 1729, when
opium was still reaching China in very small quantities. But the edict prohibit-
ing the importing of opium passed almost without notice, and the trade contin-
ued to grow throughout the century. By the 1820s, India was sending over
5,000 chests a year.
Although opium was contraband in China, opium cultivation was perfectly
legal in India. Of course, opium had extremely important medical uses in the
nineteenth century, some of which continue today. Morphine and codeine are
made from Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy. In the nineteenth century,
opium was the source of the most important drugs, without which a physician
could hardly practice medicine. Prior to the invention of the hypodermic nee-
dle, opium was mixed with water or alcohol in drugs like laudanum that were
essential to treatment of dysentery, diarrhea, asthma, diabetes, cholera, rheu-
matism, fevers, malaria, bronchitis, and any kind of pain. There was hardly any
other drug available to physicians. Opium cultivation for these uses produced
no moral dilemmas.
Indians chewed opium, as did most peoples in the world before the nine-
teenth century. Smoking the drug appears to have been invented in southern
China, where first it was mixed with tobacco—a New World import that Bei-
jing had also tried to block—then gradually the tobacco was omitted and opium
was smoked by itself in little clay pipes. The pipe with a small ball of opium is
held over a flame until the opium bubbles and evaporates. The heavy white
smoke drawn into the lungs produces the effect described by the American trav-
eler Bayard Taylor at Canton: after his sixth pipe he began to see brilliant colors
that floated before his eyes “in a confused and cloudy way, sometimes converg-
ing into spots like the eyes in a peacock’s tail, but often melting into and
through each other, like the hues of changeable silk” (Fay 1975). The opium
smoker withdraws into his or her own world, something of a vegetative state
(Cocteau said, “Opium is the only vegetable substance that communicates the
vegetable state to us”). After years of addiction, the addict becomes emaciated,
dull-eyed, lethargic, and lives for nothing but the next pipe of opium.
In the late nineteenth century, 400,000 acres of poppy were processed in
Ghazipur and sold in Banares; in Bihar, half a million acres were devoted to
poppy, which was processed at Patna. Somewhat later, a third major area
opened near Malwa in central India. These three regions produced about 6,000
tons a year, almost all bound for China. Opium production had been legal under
the Mughals, for whom it was an important source of revenue. As the British
took control from the crumbling Mughal Empire, the East India Company took
over a monopoly in opium production. Poppies were sown in November and