Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550–2010 by Carol Benedict (review)

This book is a carefully researched treatment of the role of tobacco in recent Chinese history. As such, it fits into the growing literature on commodities, consumption, and drug foods around the world, as well as the literature on China’s modern economic and social transformations. The book provides a unique contribution because tobacco has been sold, consumed, and debated in many different contexts over the past three hundred years of Chinese history. Carol Benedict’s book deals with a large number of these contexts over a very long period of time. She deals with the medical discourse on tobacco in both the early-modern and the modern periods, trade routes, gender, imports and domestic production, commercialization, industrialization, marketing, and imperialism. These topics require the use of very different types of sources, and although Benedict cannot possibly deal exhaustively with every aspect of the complex theme of tobacco in this tightly written monograph, she does provide a thorough and clear explication of the major issues.

Tobacco began to appear in China from the mid-Ming period, and domestic production began almost at once. Consumption and production spread quickly both geographically and socially. Given this rapid spread, tobacco consumption was not particularly associated with any social group or set of ideas. It could be smoked by courtesans—and thus associated with illicit activities—by respectable elite women or men as part of family or public sociability, and it was produced and used by commoners all over China. Although there was some criticism of tobacco smoking as a luxury inappropriate for some groups, there were few attempts to control its spread. Benedict shows how tobacco smoking fit into the various levels of the Chinese materia medica. There was never a consensual understanding of its properties in part because different varieties of tobacco had different patterns of consumption and were seen as different substances, but it was almost always considered beneficial.

Snuff enjoyed a brief burst of popularity as an imported good appropriate for refined consumption in the eighteenth century, and the water pipe also became popular with the elite. While snuff died out, the water pipe followed a typical pattern of consumption by spreading down in social class. The great transformation of Chinese tobacco came, however, with the rise of the cigarette after ca. 1880. The cigarette can be seen as an imported, industrial object of mass consumption, but both production and consumption grew and changed rapidly. By the 1920s, consumers in China could choose cigarettes produced from foreign or domestic tobacco, sold by Chinese or foreign companies, rolled by hand or machine, original or counterfeit. By the 1930s, more than a thousand different cigarette products circulated in Shanghai. Consumers in China had access to the same brands smoked in London and New York as well as to hand-rolled cigarettes made with newspaper and packed in discarded cartons of other brands.

The cigarette fit into most of the major public debates of the Republican period. Competition between Chinese and foreign producers was part of the push to use national goods. Tobacco consumption was part of debates over the nature and improvement of the Chinese people. Cigarettes spread widely, but pipe tobacco remained the choice in the countryside. Although the “pastoral pipe” and the concepts of Chinese tradition that were associated with it had their defenders, the cigarette—and the modern, urban China it was associated with—generated more discussion, especially when women were smoking. Female tobacco use had not been particularly anathematized in the Qing period, and cigarette smoking in particular became one of the hallmarks of the New Woman in the twentieth century. This led to campaigns against female smoking as a “race poison” that would embarrass China in the eyes of foreigners and threatened the future of the Chinese race. These campaigns were ineffectual before 1949, but under the Communists, female smoking came be associated with...