The truth about opium

by William H. Brereton

I should like to know what Mr. Storrs Turner thinks of that. He objects to British testimony, except when it coincides with his own views. There is the evidence of a Spanish nobleman, a scholar, a traveller, and an accomplished diplomatist, for him! I am afraid he will find the foreign testimony quite as unpalatable as the home article. This Mr. Launcelot Dent, by the way, was a member of the eminent firm of Dent and Co.—since dissolved—which, Mr. Turner says, in his article in the Nineteenth Century, were “legally smugglers.”

The next fallacy, number seven, is that the Chinese Government is, or ever was, anxious to put a stop to or check the use of opium amongst the people of China. That is one of the accepted propositions or dogmas of the Anti-Opium people. There is another fallacy, number ten, which I will dispose of at the same time. It is that the opposition of the Chinese officials to the introduction of opium into China arose from moral causes. There never was anything more fallacious or more distinctly untrue than that the Chinese Government is, or ever was, anxious to put a stop to the trade upon moral grounds. The sole object of the Government of China in objecting to the importation of Indian opium into the country, as I have stated already, and as everybody except the infatuated votaries of the Anti-Opium Society believes, was to protect the native drug, to prevent bullion from leaving the country, and generally to exclude foreign goods. This Don Sinibaldo de Mas points out in his book written some five and twenty years ago.

If the Chinese Government really wanted to put a stop to or check the use of opium, they would begin by doing so themselves. They would first stop the cultivation of the poppy in their own country. We have it on the high authority of Sir Robert Hart, that the drug was grown and used in China long before foreigners introduced any there. The Chinese are emphatically a law-abiding people, and if the Chinese Government really wished to put a stop to the opium culture, they could do so without any difficulty, just as our Government has put down tobacco culture in the United Kingdom. I suppose that in Cornwall and Devon, and in some parts of Ireland—the golden vein, for instance—tobacco could be grown most profitably. It could be cultivated also in the Isle of Wight, and in many other parts of the country. Why, then, is it not grown here? Simply because it is illegal to do so, and the Government is strong enough to enforce the law. If a farmer in Ireland or in England were to sow tobacco, the fact would be soon discovered, and it would be summarily stopped. The same thing could be done with even greater facility in China. Why, then, does not the Government of China suppress the cultivation of the poppy there? Simply because it does not desire to do so, because it derives a large revenue from opium, both native and foreign, and because the smoking of the drug is an ancient custom amongst the people, known by long experience to be harmless, if not beneficial. If it were possible to put down opium smoking in China, the people would assuredly resort to sam-shu, already so abundant and cheap, and that would indeed cause China’s decadence: for then we should have the working classes there indulging in spirits, when the quarrellings, outrages, and kicking of wives to death—which Mr. Turner admits are never the result of opium smoking—would ensue. I only wish we could turn our drunkards into opium smokers. If the change would only save those wretched wives and their helpless children from ill-treatment by their husbands and fathers, we should have secured one valuable end. No Government will attempt to interfere with the fixed habits of the people, especially where those habits have existed many centuries, if not thousands of years, and where they are known to be not injurious to themselves or the safety and stability of the State, and to be, in fact, harmless. We have it from Sir Robert Hart’s book, that as far as can be ascertained, the probability is that there is about the same quantity of the drug grown in China as is imported into it. That is admittedly a mere approximation, and Sir Robert Hart gives no data for it, save the returns of his Sub-Commissioners, each of which differs from the other, and which he admits are not reliable. The information upon which these Commissioners made up their returns is simply the gossip collected by them at the Treaty Ports of China: no doubt the best, and, indeed, the only, information which they could procure. But with the light thrown upon the subject by Messrs. Baber and Spence, and numerous other independent authorities, no one can doubt that there is at least three times the quantity produced in China that is imported from abroad.

Both the Customs and Consular reports on trade in China for the year 1880 as well as 1881 bear testimony to the ever-increasing production of opium in the northern and western provinces of China, and missionaries and others who have recently made journeys in the interior report the poppy crops to be much larger than before the Imperial decree purporting to prohibit its cultivation. The report of the Customs’ Assistant-in-charge at Ichang for 1880 shows that the average annual import of the Indian drug at that port does not exceed ten pikuls, while the native production in the Ichang Prefecture is estimated to be over one thousand pikuls per annum. Mr. W. Donald Spence, in his report on trade for 1880, gives an estimate of the total crop of opium raised in Western China in 1880, which is as follows:—Western Hupeh, two thousand pikuls; Eastern Szechuan, forty-five thousand pikuls; Yunnan, forty-thousand pikuls; and Kweichow, ten thousand pikuls; giving a total of ninety-seven thousand pikuls—as much, in fact, for these districts as the whole amount of Indian opium imported into China for that year. What his report for 1881 is I have already shown you. This, it must be borne in mind, is the production of Western China only. In Shantung, Chihli, the inland provinces, and Manchuria it is extensively grown, and in all the other provinces smaller quantities of the drug are produced. That nothing is being done to check this widespread cultivation of the poppy is notorious. Messrs. Soltan and Stevenson, who passed through Yunnan last year on their way from Bhamo to Chingkiang, described the country as resembling “a sea of poppy”; and Mr. Spence tells us that in 1880 and 1881 a greater breadth of land was sown with poppies in Western Hupeh than in the previous years. In Manchuria, which is a large territory forming part of the empire to the north-east of China, and in the northern provinces of China proper, there was also a general increase in the area under poppy cultivation. No efforts, in fact, are being made to stop it. On this subject Mr. Spence, in his report for 1880, remarks:—

In Western Hupeh there has been no interference with opium farmers or opium cultivation by the officials, nor, as far as I have been able to ascertain, by any of the authorities of the provinces named in this report. In Yunnan it receives direct official encouragement, and in all the cultivation is free. Its production is regarded as a fertile source of revenue to the exchequer, of pelf to officials and smugglers, of profit to farmers and merchants, and of pleasure to all. Nearly everybody smokes, and nearly everybody smuggles it about the country when he can; and in this matter there is no difference between rich and poor, lettered and unlettered, governing and governed.

After this testimony, which is corroborated in the strongest manner by many other and equally disinterested persons, who can pretend to say that the Chinese Government has any real desire to put down the poppy cultivation?

Let us now see what Don Sinibaldo de Mas has to say upon this point. Having gone into the history of the Indo-Chinese opium trade, and shown that the sole object of the Chinese Government in objecting to that trade was to prevent bullion from leaving the country, he says:—

It is totally wrong to suppose that the Mandarins are anxious to prevent the introduction of opium into the country. Many of these Mandarins smoke it; most of them, if not all, accept presents and close their eyes at opium smuggling. With the exception of the famous Lin-tsi-su and a few others who reside at Court, all the others, and I think even Ki-Ying himself, have profited by this illegal traffic. Sir I. F. Davis when in China as Minister Plenipotentiary frequently called Ki-Ying’s attention to the smuggling that was being carried on under the connivance and encouragement of rural officials.

I referred in my last lecture to a valuable paper read by Sir Rutherford Alcock at a recent meeting of the Society of Arts. Everybody knows this gentleman’s abilities and his high character, which afford the most perfect assurance that he would be incapable of asserting anything that he did not know from his own experience, or from unquestionable sources, to be true. He speaks also with authority. He may be taken to be, therefore, a perfectly unbiassed witness. He has no personal interest in the question, and there is no reason why he should state anything but what is perfectly accurate. He says, in the paper I have mentioned:—

Whatever may have been the motive or true cause, about which there hangs considerable doubt, it is certain that neither in the first edicts of 1793-6, nor as late as 1832-4, when several Imperial edicts were issued against the introduction of opium from abroad, no reference whatever is made to the moral ground of prohibition, so ostentatiously paraded in later issues, and notably in Li Hung Chang’s letter to the Anglo-Opium Society last July. The reasons exclusively put forward in the first of these edicts (in 1793) were that “It wasted the time and property of the people of the Inner Land, leading them to exchange their silver and commodities for the vile dirt of the foreigner.” And as late as 1836, when memorials were presented to the Emperor, showing the connection of the opium trade with the exportation of sycee, they generally regarded the question in a political and financial character, rather than a moral light; and certainly, in several edicts issued between 1836 and 1839, when Lin made his grand coup, there is little, if any, reference to the evils of opium smoking, but very clear language as to the exportation of bullion. When we reflect that this “vile dirt,” as I will presently show, was being extensively cultivated in the provinces of China, and largely consumed by his own subjects, we may be permitted to question whether the balance of trade turned by the large importation of opium, and the leakage of the sycee silver, so emphatically and angrily pointed to in after years, was not the leading motive for the prohibition of the foreign drug. We have it on authority, that “From the commencement of the commercial intercourse down to 1828-29 the balance of trade had always been in favour of the Chinese, and great quantities of bullion accumulated in China. Since that date the balance of trade had been in the opposite direction, and bullion began to flow out of China. As silver became more scarce, it naturally rose in value, and the copper currency of the realm (and the only one), already depreciated by means of over-issues and mixture of foreign coin of an inferior standard, appeared to suffer depreciation when compared with its nominal equivalent in sycee; and the effects of this change fell heavily upon a large and important class of Government officers, and ultimately upon the revenue itself. Memorials were presented to the Emperor on the subject, and the export of sycee was prohibited.”