The Anti-Opium Campaign

Opium culture in nineteenth-century China is described by Keith McMahon in The Fall of the God of Money (2002), and sumptuously illustrated in K. Flow’s The Chinese Encounter with Opium (2009). Peter Lee’s The Big Smoke; The Chinese art and craft of opium(1999) is a hands-on guide to the techniques and utensils used in opium smoking. The picture of opium use in China has been substantially revised by Richard Newman’s article ‘Opium Smoking in Late Imperial China: A reconsideration’, Modern Asian Studies 29/4 (1995), pp. 765-94; and particularly by Dikotter, Laaman and Zhou in Narcotic Culture. Previous histories such as Margaret Goldsmith’s The Trail of Opium; The Eleventh Plague (1939) need to be read in the light of their findings.

For the anti-opium movement in Britain, see Friend of China, the journal of the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, published from 1875, and Opium and the People (1981) by Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, which also surveys the medical use of opiates in Victorian Britain and contrasts myth and reality in the classic image of the opium den. For more on the ‘yellow peril’ and opium scares and propaganda, see Barry Milligan’s Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in 19th-century British culture (1995).

The early prohibitions of opium are discussed in Diana L. Ahmad, The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Centur American West (2007); David Musto, The American Disease (1973) and Richard Davenport-Hines, The Pursuit of Oblivion(2001). The British Royal Commission is the subject of John F. Richards’s ‘Opium and the British Empire: The Royal Commission of 1895’, Modern Asian Studies 36 (2002), pp. 375-420. There is much new information on the consequences of opium prohibition in China in Dikotter, Laaman and Zhou’s Narcotic Culture.