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

A key to understanding and appreciating this fascinating book is telegraphed by the periodization in its title. Tobacco, a New World crop, became globally enjoyed beginning in the sixteenth century, and Benedict shows us how fully the Chinese have participated in its production, circulation, and consumption from the earliest decades of its spread around the world.

Benedict’s story moves from inner Asia, where tobacco smoking first spread among border frontiersmen, to the Qing court, to private farmer cultivation adapted to regional terrains and markets throughout the empire, moving consumption from north to south, city to country, elite to commoner, and men to women. Locally grown sun-dried shredded tobacco could vary in quality and price, but the finer cuts were traded long distance, and the smoke of choice for all was the long-handled bamboo pipe. Benedict has found evidence for the rituals of sociability associated with tobacco in literati essays, poetry, and fiction. Qing medical literature yields accounts of the “pungent, warming and potent” qualities of tobacco as a “herb” (bencao), but it was never an ingredient in classical prescription pharmacy. Lumping tobacco with alcohol, doctors were generally tolerant of moderate use, and although it was sometimes called “herb of longing” because of people’s strong desire for it, the model of a smoke as addictive seems to have been reserved for opium. Even though the opium–tobacco connection figures in the nineteenth-century Chinese discourse about opium as addiction, Benedict has little to say here.

In her chapters on smoking and fashion, Benedict points out that elite Chinese seem to have been more worried about smoking as déclassé than health hazard. Over time the long-stemmed pipe came to be associated with peasant consumption habits, while snuff and water pipe enjoyed a vogue among the elite. Since snuff-taking rituals were modeled on European practice and water pipes came in from the Middle East, these attest to the fashion potential of foreign imports in the supposedly ethnocentric celestial empire. Europe and China diverged, apparently, in the respectability of smoking for Qing era Chinese women of all classes. Twentieth-century modernity in China produced a gradual “masculinization” of smoking. As modern women became more publically visible, and as the advertising and marketing of industrially produced cigarettes came to amplify long-standing erotic associations of cigarettes and sexuality, women were put on notice: only bad girls smoke. These social norms were gradually so powerful that foreign visitors to socialist China assumed that female abstinence was a traditional hangover.

Benedict, a historian of medicine, may have originally thought she would be writing about tobacco as a chapter in the history of health and disease in China. But her sources led elsewhere, and she astutely followed them to produce a fascinating and multifaceted study of local cultures of consumption in the globalizing world of transregional trade, production, and commerce. Her book belongs with works on the other “early modern” commodities like sugar, tea, and coffee—also pleasurable ingestibles that reshaped agriculture and trade and reconfigured patterns of sociability, commensality, and enjoyment in place after place. Testament to the interconnectedness of an early modern world, even as participants remained ignorant of each other’s high culture, tobacco products transformed only gradually as twentieth-century industrial production and mass marketing made the cigarette a symbol of modernity and a recognized public health menace.

In sum, rather than a uniquely modern product based on industrial manufacturing and mass advertising, smoking is a hardy hybrid that continues to sustain diverse local habits of production and consumption. Still, this book shows there is something special about the machine-rolled cigarette. It has been cheap, available, and in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) it has produced a lucrative revenue stream for government; in fact, most cigarettes have been manufactured by local or national-level state enterprises. The well-advertised mild taste of flucured, as opposed to...