The opium controversy.

  • Arbuthnot, Alexander John, 1822-1907.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The opium controversy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    1882. by the East India Company ; but it appears to be an undoubted fact that the practice dates from a much earlier period. The cultivation of the poppy for the purpose of making opium is stated by one authority to have commenced in China upwards of two hundred years ago. By another it is said to have existed more than five hundred years. Mr. Watters, Her Majesty’s Consul at Ichang, who has made careful inquiries on the spot into the origin of the practice of opium- smoking, asserts that in the west of China it had been indulged in for several hundred years, long before either the present reigning dynasty or foreign merchants and their opium were ever dreamt of.1 In India the manufacture of opium was a Government monopoly under the Mahomedan rulers, and there are traditions of Indian opium having been exported from India into China by way of Thibet con- siderably more than a hundred years ago. It was also exported from India to China by sea by the Portuguese in the early part and middle of the last century. The trade of the East India Company in opium commenced rather more than a century ago, and has continued in the hands of private traders since 1834 up to the present time. When this trade commenced, the use of the drug was probably far more prevalent, as indeed it still seems to be, in Western than in Eastern China ; but we may be certain that it was not unknown in the eastern part of the empire, and that the trade first with the Portuguese, and subse- quently with the British East India Company, originated in the fact that there was an effective demand in the eastern districts of China for a drug which had long been in use in the western districts. In 1800 the importation of the drug was prohibited by the Chinese Government; but the prohibition was not attended by any diminu- tion of the trade, which appears all along to have been connived at by the Chinese officials. During the forty years which followed, the prohibition was repeated more than once; but, notwithstanding edicts against the importation and laws against the cultivation and manu- facture of the drug, the use of opium continued in every class of Chinese society, with no attempt at secrecy either as to its sale or as to its consumption. In 1839 the first war between England and. China commenced. In regard to the origin of this war there seems to be a good deal of misapprehension. It is commonly described as the ‘ opium war; ’ indeed, the Anti-opiumists often speak of both the wars with China as opium wars, because the incident which imme- diately led to the first of these wars was the confiscation and destruc- tion by the Chinese authorities of a large quantity of opium, the property of British merchants. The first war might be more properly described as the silver war ; for it is well known that it was the ex- portation of silver in connection with the opium trade, rather than any objections to the trade upon moral grounds, that led to the measures which brought about the war. This is shown by the word- 1 The Finances and Public Works of India, 1869-81, pp. 268-69.