Dark Propensities

AChinese friend​ and I have taken to batting words at each other like ping-pong balls. I’m trying to improve my Mandarin and she is curious about Bengali, but some things stop us in our tracks. Rice porridge is one of them. Cooked rice can be revived by boiling in water, or simply by pouring water over it, although fancier versions use broth or green tea, as in Japanese ochazuke. It can be reassuringly warm in cold winters, or refreshingly cold in hot summers, and can be paired with side dishes from a single green chilli to pickled vegetables, or salted fish and eggs. My friend tells me that in Mandarin it is called 粥 (zhōu). I say that the Bengali word for the cold, overnight version is panta-bhaat, and the cooked version is phena-bhaat (bhaat means cooked rice). Then I remember that phena-bhaat is a regional term, associated with the Bengali of Kolkata, where I grew up. For my mother, whose culinary vocabulary was that of her childhood in East Bengal, now Bangladesh, cooked rice porridge was jaou, a softer pronunciation of the Mandarin zhōu. During my childhood, I realise, East Bengal’s long-standing trade connections with the Chinese mainland were behind the steaming bowls of jaou-bhaat my mother cooked.

The British called it congee, a name now used by countless restaurants and food stalls, from Hong Kong and Taiwan to the Chinatowns of London and Liverpool. ‘Congee’ has an Asian root, though Indian rather than Chinese, and it too is a product of transcultural movements. It comes from the Tamil word kanji or kañci and its cognates in South India, and entered the English language thanks to the Portuguese, who were great believers in the food’s easily digestible goodness. In 1563, it was mentioned in the Colóquios dos simples e drogas he cousas medicinais da Índia (‘Conversations on the Simples, Drugs and Medicinal Substances of India’), printed in the Portuguese stronghold of Goa. Its author was Garcia de Orta, a converso who had managed to evade the Inquisition’s crackdown on the Cristãos Novos (New Christians), whom the Portuguese called marranos (swine). De Orta left for Goa, where he was a doctor to the local people as well as the Portuguese, and managed to escape the Inquisition until his death in 1568, though twelve years later his body was exhumed and burned as belonging to a crypto-Jew. His monumental book is full of references to local medical practices. He is highly critical of most of them, but rice water, ‘which they call CANJE’, gets his approval. De Orta’s book was translated into Latin by the pre-eminent botanist of the time, Charles de l’Écluse, or Clusius, almost as soon as it reached Europe, and went through multiple editions and translations. Much of Europe’s understanding of Indian flora can be traced to its pages.

Some of de Orta’s descriptions of herbs and plants are scientifically accurate; others bear little or no connection to reality. One chapter concerns the plant that is the focus of Amitav Ghosh’s Smoke and Ashes. ‘I should like to have accurate information about the AMFIAM which is what the people of this land use, and we call OPIUM,’ de Orta’s interlocutor announces (the book is written as a dialogue between de Orta and an imaginary colleague). The response is a tangled tale that moves from opium’s use as a sex drug and the varieties of poppy in India to a discussion of the Greek and Arabic etymology of its name. De Orta also tells stories, for example about the Persian opium enthusiast he met when serving as a physician at the court of Ahmadnagar: ‘This Khorasani [man from East Persia], though he was well instructed and a great writer and annotator, always was drowsy and sleepy. Yet, when put to work, he spoke like a discreet and educated man.’

De Orta’s interest in opium isn’t surprising: poppy juice had been known for its medicinal properties since antiquity. Alexander the Great’s army may have introduced Anatolian opium into Iran, a history implicit in the linguistic connections between Greek opion, Persian afyun and Indian afeem. Mercantile networks across Asia carried it to China, where it was known as yāpiàn. By the 16th century, the Mongols had passed on the practice of oral consumption of poppy extract to the three great Islamicate empires: the Safavids of Persia, the Mughals of northern India and the Ottomans of Turkey. Taken in the form of diluted tinctures and pills or grains, opium was valued for its ability to induce sleep and alleviate pain. Recreational use (usually in those same forms rather than smoked) was limited to the rich and upper classes. Large-scale cultivation of the Papaver somniferum was difficult and resource-intensive, and the processing of the raw gum was a lengthy and complex process that kept prices high and put opium beyond the means of the vast majority.

In the early 17th century Portuguese and Dutch merchants changed all that. European powers were eager to tap into lucrative Asian trade routes, seeking spices, textiles, precious stones and other valuable commodities. Like its competitors, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC), founded in 1602, used strategic local alliances and gifts to gain access to regional markets. Part of its strategy for gaining dominance in the Indian Ocean spice trade was to give opium to local rulers as part of negotiations. This fostered goodwill as well as creating demand for the product, which the VOC sought to monopolise as it expanded its trade networks across Asia. Although opium was difficult to cultivate and process, it was the perfect merchandise for maritime trade: it was compact and light, and stable enough to travel long distances in ships’ holds.

The VOC’s practices did not escape the attention of the English, who were early enthusiasts for Asian luxury goods and curiosities. In 1609, Ben Jonson’s The Entertainment at Britain’s Burse, a masque written to celebrate the opening of London’s largest shopping centre, the New Exchange, impersonated the patter of a London market seller:

What do you lacke? What is’t you buy? … China Chaynes, China Braceletts, China scarfes, China fannes, China girdles, China knives, China boxes, China Cabinetts, Caskets, umbrellas, Sundyalls, Howerglasses, lookinge glasses, Burninge glasses, Concave glasses, Triangular glasses, Convexe glasses, Christall globes, Waxen pictures, Estrich Egges, Birds of Paradise, Muskcads, Indian Mice, Indian ratts, China dogges, and China cattes? Flowrs of silke, Mosaick fishes? Waxen fruict, and Purslane dishes? Very fine Cages for Birds, Billyard Balls, Purses, Pipes, rattles, Basons, Ewers, Cups, Cans, Voyders, Toothpicks, Targets, falchions, Beards of all ages, Vizards, Spectacles! Sir what you lack.

By the 18th century, one item overshadowed all others in Britain’s mercantile imagination: tea. The East India Company, founded in 1600, first brought tea to Britain from China in the mid-17th century, but importing this prized commodity steadily drained the country’s reserves of silver currency or specie. The Chinese had little interest in Britain’s chief export, wool, or later in its manufactured goods. By the 1750s, Britain had paid close to £26 million to China for tea, and recovered only a quarter of that amount through the sale of its own merchandise. ‘We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures,’ the Qianlong emperor bluntly stated in a letter to George III in 1793. The solution was to emulate the VOC and offer opium as a commodity that would generate its own demand: the addictive cycle on which every drug cartel depends.

Opium was not unfamiliar to the British. In the form of laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol, it was found in medicines for everything from headaches and insomnia to morning sickness and colic – in the form of sweet syrups like Godfrey’s Cordial (also called Mother’s Friend). Although these medicines were addictive and sometimes fatal, the impact of orally consumed opium paled in comparison to the devastation wrought by opium smoking, which merchants now began to push aggressively in China.

Before long, several thousand tonnes of opium were being grown in India every year, using new and more efficient methods; India would henceforth supply most of the opium consumed in East Asia and China. The amount of opium imported into China increased from about two hundred chests a year in the 1730s to sixty thousand a year in the 1880s. The industry had two hubs: Patna in present-day Bihar in the east, and Malwa, further west. Malwa was able to maintain relative political and mercantile autonomy; it had its own opium trade, which competed with the British. In Bengal and Bihar, however, millions died of famine in 1769-70, after productive farmland was transformed into poppy fields through coercion by the East India Company’s ‘Opium Department’. In 1797, Coleridge’s opium-fuelled dream inspired him to write about Kubla Khan’s ‘stately pleasure-dome’, and in 1821 Thomas De Quincey published Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. By this time, what had begun with Britain’s seemingly harmless appetite for tea had exacted a grave toll. The opium trade cost the lives and livelihoods of millions, both the Chinese who succumbed to addiction, and the Indians who suffered and died supplying the demand.

Meanwhile, there was a new participant in the market, the newly independent United States of America. When US trade connections faltered after the War of Independence, China offered a lifeline. Chinese porcelain and fabric, as well as tea, were traded but what fuelled the market was opium. The American-built, 360-tonne Empress of China set sail in 1784, marking America’s involvement in the lucrative new trade. In 1804 American merchants began transporting opium to China from Smyrna (now Izmir in Turkey), neatly bypassing the British-controlled Indian supply chain. By 1818, the US was supplying as much as a third of China’s opium market.

All attempts by the Chinese state to limit the damage caused by the spread of opium addiction failed. A ban on opium, imposed in 1796, was circumvented by means of smuggling: the East India Company used private traders, who were licensed to take goods from India to China, to sell the opium to smugglers along the Chinese coast. In 1839, the Daoguang emperor, rejecting proposals to legalise and tax opium, appointed the viceroy of Huguang, Lin Zexu, to halt the opium trade. He travelled to Guangzhou, where he arrested dealers, confiscated thousands of opium pipes and, when British dealers refused to give up their opium supplies in exchange for tea, stopped all foreign trade. Eventually the dealers handed over a vast amount of opium, which was burned on the banks of the Pearl River at Humen. The resulting Opium Wars further weakened the already struggling Qing dynasty; it was forced to lift the prohibition and legalise the opium trade. The addiction crisis in China was used by the British to justify further colonial and mercantile exploitation. After the Opium Wars, the trade increased further, diminishing only in the final decades of the 19th century. In 1907 Britain signed a treaty agreeing to eliminate opium exports from India to China over the next decade; in return, China agreed to stop domestic production. Opium possession was criminalised in Britain in 1920.

Amitav Ghosh​ has written before about plants, trade, Western narratives of progress and the legacies of empire. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, published in 2021, began with the genocide inflicted by the VOC in 1621 on the native inhabitants of the Indonesian Banda Islands, the only place in the world where nutmeg grew in the early 17th century, when it was more expensive than gold. Ghosh argued that the atrocities committed by the VOC were symptomatic of an emergent European view of the earth as a resource to be exploited, rather than a living entity with which humans coexist. This set the stage for industrialisation and the intensification of capitalism, systems which severed the bonds between humans and the natural world, turning forests, rivers and soil into commodities to be extracted and processed on a vast scale. The opium trade followed this destructive trajectory in many ways, but the poppy is different from both fossil fuels and mineral resources in that there has never been any risk of the supply being exhausted. Neither was there the challenge, as with nutmeg, of maintaining control over the unique combination of conditions that made it possible for a plant to thrive in a specific place. Instead, there was a series of hostile takeovers of local economies, an aggressive scaling up of production and the ruthless monopolisation of supply chains. As Ghosh argues, ‘Europeans did not, by any means, invent the opium trade. Rather, as with the traffic in human beings on the Atlantic coast, they took certain pre-existing small-scale practices and transformed them while also expanding them by orders of magnitude.’

Despite European and British efforts to emphasise the ‘traditional’ use of opium in both India and China, neither country had a history of production or consumption anything like those created by Western imperialism. It is ‘one of the most astonishing aspects of the West’s involvement with opium in Asia’, Ghosh writes, that not only did the colonising nations ‘succeed in using opium to extract incalculable wealth from Asians, but they were successful also in obscuring their own role in the trade by claiming that it had existed from time immemorial because non-white people were by nature prone to addiction and depravity’. The effects of this ‘biopolitical conflict’ continue to reverberate today, he argues, in the exploitation of opioid addiction by pharmaceutical companies complicit in its proliferation.

Alongside this harrowing history, Ghosh builds a narrative that is more personal and reticular, exploring the ways in which the opium trade has affected lives in different eras. Ghosh is Bengali and, like my realisation of the Sino-Indian origins of jaou-bhaat, his detection of the hidden influence of China in everyday Bengali life came via consumption: the tea he drinks, the sugar he adds to it (cheeni in Bengali, which is also the Bengali word for ‘Chinese’), and the peanuts he eats (chinébadam). He charts the way in which the story of opium touches subjects seemingly unconnected to narco-imperialism, from the ubiquitous tanchoi woven brocade saris of Indian weddings, to English garden design; from Francis Scott Key’s gaining inspiration for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ on a ship built with opium profits by an Indian Parsi family, the Wadias, to the founding of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) in 1865 by the Scottish merchant Thomas Sutherland, who had worked in Hong Kong for the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O). The bank’s initial dealings were in Indian opium.

The naturalist Joseph Banks was among the six hundred people who were part of George Macartney’s mission to the court of the Qianlong emperor in 1793, funded by the East India Company and intended to improve trading relations between Britain and China, though it proved singularly unsuccessful.* Banks visited the nurseries of Canton (Guangzhou) and returned to Britain with tiger lilies, chrysanthemums, tree peonies, hydrangeas and repeat-flowering roses. The best-known of these nurseries was the Fa-ti Gardens, Hua di in Mandarin, or ‘land of flowers’. (Two centuries earlier, in 1602, at an early stage of trading between China and the West, the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, the first Westerner admitted to the Chinese court, created a map of the world for the Ming emperor. It showed another recently discovered ‘Land of Flowers’, which the Spanish conquistadors named La Florida.)

Ghosh’s story is also one of silence and suppression. The opium trade was rarely acknowledged in 19th and early 20th-century Bengali society, just as it was swept under the expensive carpets laid in the mansions of the Boston Brahmins and ‘Canton graduates’ who amassed fortunes in China before returning to the US. Ghosh thinks his Bengali ancestors probably moved to Bhojpuri-speaking Chhapra in Bihar, a major centre of opium production, as agents of the colonial administration, but it was never talked about at home. ‘The crucial detail that my father had excluded from his glowing accounts of Chhapra,’ he writes, ‘was that the town’s chief business in the mid-19th century, when our ancestors settled there, was opium.’ Ghosh notes the familiar names in the long list of participants in the trade. The poet Rabindranath Tagore’s grandfather Dwarkanath was among the Indian merchants who, after the First Opium War, petitioned the colonial government for a share of the reparations China was forced to pay. Warren Delano Jr, grandfather of FDR, was one of many businessmen whose shipping interests focused on opium. The Astors and the Cabots, the Websters, Coolidges and Forbes’s all traded in opium to shore up their future in the uncertain economic landscape of early 19th-century America. During the First Opium War, Abiel Abbot Low, who had knowledge of the trade in China, established his own shipping company and with the profits built a mansion in Brooklyn Heights, from the windows of which his family could see the Statue of Liberty going up. In 2015 it was on the market for $40 million.

Ghosh pays attention to the role that writers have played in our collective inheritance of the histories in Smoke and Ashes. Kipling toured the Ghazipur opium factory in 1899, and wrote an essay about it. Orwell was born in Bihar, where his father was a sub-deputy opium agent. Dickens’s essay on opium in Household Words is a classic example of Victorian both-sidesism, in which he counters criticism of the opium trade with the trader’s defence that ‘if you were to check or prohibit this drug, a craving would arise for some other stimulus,’ and concludes that the ‘reader will find the opium question one not to be answered with off-hand readiness’. Tagore wrote an article on what he called ‘The Death Traffic in China’. Ghosh doesn’t discuss many Chinese writers, though he does mention Zhang Changjia’s Opium Talk (1878), which portrayed the drug as an intrinsic part of the smoke-filled modernity Western powers had brought to China. There were others, of course, notably Peng Yangou, whose Souls from the Land of Darkness (1909) exposed the generational legacy and trauma of addiction.

Smoke and Ashes emerged from the research Ghosh undertook for his Ibis trilogy, set in the years leading up to the First Opium War (the Ibis is a former slave ship later used in the opium trade). He refers repeatedly to the characters in these novels: Deeti, a labourer whose family is one of the thousands that keep up the relentless pace of opium production in Ghazipur; Kesri Singh, Deeti’s brother, whose post as havildar – a sergeant – in the East India Company takes him to the Battle of Sanyuanli in the First Opium War; and Zachary Reid, a mixed-race American sailor, whose purchase of opium on the streets of Calcutta is a first step towards a career trading opium futures. These references are a gamble in a work of non-fiction, but are effective in bringing to life the fragments of biography and statistical traces that comprise the archive. They are also a reminder of the way individual lives are inextricably bound up with a complex and unpredictable system, then as now. Ghosh underlines the resemblance between the tactics of the opium industry in the 18th and 19th centuries and the business strategies of drug companies like Purdue Pharma, which encourage opioid dependency in the US, or Shell and BP, which push global dependency on fossil fuels. The opium poppy, he argues, is a ‘historical force in its own right’ because of its ‘unmatched ability to propagate itself by bonding with humanity’s darkest propensities’. Its story ‘is at once a cautionary tale about human hubris, and a lesson about humanity’s limits and frailties’.