Pacific Crossing: Californian Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong

5 - Preparing Opium for America

191 5 Preparing Opium for America* The high income of California created a market for top-quality commodities and luxury goods. The Chinese there demanded, and were able to afford, No. 1 China rice, refined white sugar, shark’s fin and bird’s nest. Above all, they wanted the best opium that money could buy. The export of prepared opium from Hong Kong to California, more than any other commodity, highlights the inextricably intertwined relationship between Chinese emigration and Hong Kong’s political , social, and economic development. It demonstrates the immense volume and value of Hong Kong’s export trade, and the alignments and strategies that opium merchants had to adopt to take full advantage of the trade. At the same time, the trade had a crucial impact on the colonial government’s fiscal policy and practice, as well as its management of the Chinese business community. From Raw Opium to Prepared Opium With the occupation by the British in 1841, Hong Kong became the major distribution center and warehouse for Indian opium—mainly Patna and Malwa from Bengal—for the China market. By the late 1840s, it was estimated that three-quarters of the entire Indian opium crop passed through Hong Kong.1 To a large extent, being the emporium for Britain’s trade in opium was Hong Kong’s raison d’être, and in turn, with its scarcity of resources, Hong Kong relied heavily on the drug for financial support. As historian Christopher Munn claims: * An earlier version of this chapter appears in Journal of Chinese Overseas, vol. 1, no. 1 (2005), pp. 16–42. Pacific Crossing 192 [T]he opium trade and Hong Kong are so obviously intertwined that it is hardly possible to consider the early history of the colony without some reference to the drug: the colony was founded because of opium; it survived its difficult early years because of opium; its principal merchants grew rich on opium; its government subsisted on the high land rent and other revenue made possible by the opium trade.2 In the 1840s, most of the raw opium was transshipped to the newly opened treaty ports on the China coast, with only a small amount remaining in Hong Kong to be boiled and prepared for smoking by local consumers. Hong Kong consumers were able to enjoy the luxury of having Patna opium imported in bulk, and Patna—because of its low morphia content—was deemed to produce the finest quality of smoking. Turkish and Persian opium, containing a much higher proportion of morphia, was rarely used for smoking, while “native opium”—that is, opium grown in China—though grown in greater volume than generally recognized, was considered very low grade.3 Raw opium was imported to Hong Kong in chests of 40 balls, with each chest weighing on average 120 catties or 1,920 taels. Since the main mode of consuming opium among Chinese was by smoking, the raw opium had to be boiled beforehand. After boiling, a ball weighing 48 taels raw was reduced to about 25 taels, so that a chest of 40 balls of raw opium—1,920 taels—would produce approximately 1,000 taels of prepared opium.4 When boilers made more than 1,000 taels from one chest, the product became more dilute and its value depreciated . Though by so doing the boiler might make a greater profit temporarily , in the long term, as word quickly got around, he discredited himself. Like today’s cigarettes, opium prepared by different companies was marketed under different brand names, with the leading ones boasting of prominent “master boilers” and emphasizing other features of their products, such as the quality of the water used. It was well known that the two Hong Kong firms producing the leading brands, Fook Lung and Lai Yuen, never returned more than 1,000 taels per chest, and consumers who valued quality were happy to pay more for them.5 Opium smoking has been so widely condemned that it is hardly necessary to expand our discussion in that direction. Rather, it would be useful here to take a broader view in order to understand the cultural, social, and economic issues within the context of transpacific Chinese society in the late nineteenth century. Preparing Opium for America 193 It is useful to see that, as the historian Frank Dikötter and his co-authors point out, opium smoking among Chinese fulfilled a...