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Amar Farooqui, The Social Life of Opium in China, Social History of Medicine, Volume 20, Issue 1, April 2007, Pages 182–183, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkm020
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Extract
This book is a fascinating study of the social and cultural dimensions of opium use in China. Zheng Yangwen draws on a wide range of Chinese and English language sources to reconstruct the history of the spread of opium consumption, the dissemination of knowledge about the drug and its incorporation into the everyday lives of almost all sections of society by the nineteenth century. Whereas there is a vast literature on the opium trade, especially for the colonial period, attention has been recently refocused on the ways in which opium penetrated and impacted upon societies and cultures in Asia. The early south-east Asian history of the substance is particularly obscure. In reconstructing the social life of opium, Zheng also provides us with a valuable account of its pre-colonial past in China.
Citing sources from the late Ming period, Zheng dates the introduction of opium into China to the latter half of the fifteenth century. It is generally recognised that opium as a narcotic has an eastern Mediterranean origin. Long-distance Asian trading networks in the pre-modern period would have enabled transmission of knowledge about the properties of the drug across the Indian Ocean and overland along the Silk Road. During the late pre-colonial period, the opium poppy was being cultivated in several parts of Iran, Afghanistan and India. It is therefore unlikely that opium, at least as a medicine, was entirely unknown to the Chinese, the more so because of its reputation as a potent pain-killer. The substance appeared among the various exotic items offered as tribute to the emperor in the Ming period. It would appear that by the end of that dynasty, and at the commencement of Qing rule ( c . mid-seventeenth century), the uppermost sections of the ruling elite were quite familiar with opium.