Written by Kat Jivkova
In 1894, Shanghai port doctor Robert Jamieson stated that “every European knows that if once he were recognised as an opium smoker he would be socially lost, and all his chances in life would instantly disappear”. In claiming so, Jamieson contributed to a growing discourse among China’s Western population, centred around opium, which drew a racial line between Chinese opium smokers and Western abstainers. Indeed, since the Opium Wars (1839-1842), China and opium were connected in the Western mind through various mediums: The popular Chinese fictional character Fu Manchu was depicted as a heavy opium addict, newspapers including the Times reported the “wretched-looking” and “repulsive” opium dens they encountered in China, and British lawmakers envisioned the Chinatown in Limehouse as habitues for drug importation and distribution. Contrary to these stereotypes, we find that there were also Western residents in China who smoked opium, and many of these even held senior administrative positions. This challenges the assumption that Western opium smokers were “socially lost” and presents a far more complex picture of Western opium consumption in China throughout the era of the Treaty Ports. I briefly explore this phenomenon and its implications on Western attitudes toward opium between 1840 and 1930.
Traditionally, historians have suggested that Western taboo against opium manifested in questions of race. The Chinese dependence on opium was viewed by the West as evidence of their “pre-modern” society and racial differences. In this respect, if Europeans were to take up the habit, “they would be putting themselves on a level with the Asiatics”. To my knowledge, only one study has placed focus on Western opium smokers: L.J.V. Sweeney’s study effectively traces the scant evidence available on Westerners consuming opium in China – this therefore is my main source of reference. Sweeney analyses the attitudes of one Scottish doctor who resided in China, Duncan MacPherson, toward opium. Contrary to mainstream portrayals of the drug, MacPherson alludes to its medical uses: “The particles [of opium] to a certain extent guard the system against disease and, by tonic of its influence, strengthen the several organs”. It is important to note that opium had been used in Britain to alleviate cholera epidemics in the 1830s, further reflecting the medical benefits of its composition, and detaching it from its alleged “Chineseness” in Britain. MacPherson even documented his experiences after trying opium: “It is very odd the effect opium has upon me: I could not get up, nor could I go to sleep, but was in a sort of dream all day”. Therefore, opium was certainly consumed by Western residents of China. MacPherson’s own motivations were driven by his desire to learn more of the harms and potential benefits of the drug, and to empathise with the patients who suffered from opium addiction in his care.
Other medical professionals similarly defended opium but for far more racialised reasons than MacPherson. For instance, the Surgeon-General Sir William Moore stated that “opium is not the deadly agent which it has been painted” and argued that it was a necessity for the “Eastern races”. Colonial Surgeon Phineas Ayres argued that opium was critical to the survival of “the poor heathen Chinese”. Meanwhile, customs officer H.N. Lay suggested that “many water-bound populations [in China] would simply perish” without opium. Further, the Scottish merchant William Jardine stated that Chinese labourers used opium as “a social relaxation, a release from pain or temporary escape from a miserable existence”. In this respect, opium was intrinsically tied to the Chinese race in medical as well as cultural terms. Aside from medical professionals, missionaries also portrayed opium smoking as a threat to Western civilisation, once again reasserting the practice as an exclusively Chinese one.
Another short-term resident in China, the postal clerk John Wright, recorded his opium experiences in his diary of 1852: “Smoke a pipe of opium to try effect, it had none, so I suppose I did not do it properly”. While this is one of the very few accounts in the 1850s of Western opium consumption, it provides evidence to suggest that some Western officials exhibited a level of curiosity toward the drug and did not feel concerned about losing “all chances of life” after trying it. Further, the British diplomat, C.T. Gardner – who was stationed in Chefoo in the Shandong Province – recorded using “immoderate opium-smoking” as a means of recovering from a severe fever in the winter of 1865. Gardner even went as far as to publish a defence of the opium trade in the “Friend of China” in 1879. Meanwhile, the businessman Henry Lazarus, who was based in Shanghai in the 1870s, recounted trying opium “just to see what it was like”. Therefore, the popularisation of opium smoking in the 1870s and 1880s among Chinese urban elites was also mirrored by Western consumers, most of whom used the drug for medicinal purposes or out of curiosity about its effects. These examples all serve to challenge the assumption that Western residents in China did not engage in this taboo act.
Aside from these instances, most Western residents were deterred from smoking opium, which can largely be attributed to the following factors: the increasing separation of Chinese and European communities as the number of trading ports in China expanded, and the influence of missionary imperialism, which underscored the idea of opium as vice. This meant that opium consumption among Westerners was largely confined to a small group of elites, many of whom were not all too concerned about the repercussions of their actions, and medical doctors, who were interested in experimenting with the drug. It was only in the twentieth century that opium smoking became increasingly separated from its association with the “backwardness” of Chinese society, and far more with the orientalist exoticism which Western clientele were so attracted to.
In the case of Western opium consumption outside of China, we see most accounts come from articles based on Limehouse Chinatown in London. Many newspaper reports in the early-twentieth century gave accounts of white residents of West London purchasing opium pellets in Chinatown and subsequently suffering from opium poisoning. Rather than focusing on the vices of these white residents, the articles emphasise the threats that Chinese opium dens posed to the respectable elements of Western society, further creating a dichotomy between the white victim and the Chinese villain. One article published by The Times, was headlined “East-End Opium Dens” in spite of the fact that the white resident in question had died in his own apartment in the West End of London. Therefore, any signifier that Westerners were participating in opium smoking was curbed by calling attention to Chinese influence and corruption.
This article aimed to detach opium from its connotations as inherently Chinese, by highlighting the ways in which it permeated Western society. Although opium smoking was not a popular pursuit among Westerners in China, we see that there were instances in which residents smoked opium. While it is traditionally thought that Westerners viewed opium as a threat to their respective civilisation, the Western medical community’s preoccupation with the drug in particular challenges this narrative. Opium was not as taboo a topic for Westerners as first assumed. Nevertheless, opium smoking still constructed a racial binary between China and the West which remained well into the twentieth century.
Bibliography
Chandler, James. “The Opium Connection: Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, and D. W. Griffith.” Studies in English literature, 1500-1900 56, no. 4 (2016): 895-924.
Forman, Ross G. China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
McMahon, Keith. The Fall of the God of Money: Opium Smoking in Nineteenth-Century China. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002.
Metrick-Chen, Lenore. Collecting Objects/Excluding People Chinese Subjects and American Visual Culture, 1830-1900. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012.
Richards, Jeffrey. China and the Chinese in Popular Film: From Fu Manchu to Charlie Chan. London: Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2019.
Sweeney, L. J.V. “Representations of Western Opium Consumption in China: Informal Empire, Medicine and Modernity, 1840-1930.” Social history of medicine: the journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 36, no. 2 (2023): 386-408.
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