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OPIUM 鴉片煙 IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
1850s-1930s -- Page 2
Making & Selling
Smuggling
Using
Banning & Curing
This page is an annex to the main Opium page, added because loading time was getting too slow. The table of contents below may jump you to either page, depending on content. However, you will find that the main Opium page is better for browsing.
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Commerce in Opium Lamp Chimneys
Chimneys for opium lamps were almost always made of glass. In North America, as is true of opium pipe bowls and opium itself, such chimneys could not be produced locally and thus had to be imported. Stewart Culin suggested in 1891 (Note 1) that some were re-exports from China, having been shipped there from glass makers in Birmingham, England. Other chimneys, however, like the one illustrated in the North American Opium Lamps article on this website, are made of the bubbly glass that typifies the cheaper products of traditional glass works in China itself.
The Chung Collection at the University of British Columbia (Note 2) preserves a unique set of lamp chimneys in their original packaging, recovered from the 1910s-1930s cache in Vancouver's former Wing Sang store (Note 2). It may be the only such set to have survived anywhere in the world. Three suppliers, who seem to have been manufacturers rather than mere wholesalers, are represented. All were in the city of Guangzhou (Canton): Guang Hua on the north side of Xiajiupu district, Guang Heng in the same district, and Guang An, on the east side of Youlanmen district.
A few of the boxes have woodblock-printed labels. The one above reads "Guang Hua Store, specialized in making fashionable glass, opium utensils, and other things; the store is located in the capital of Guangdong, Xiajiupu district. Large size thickened-rim chimney, one piece" Here, "store" means firm or company. Each box holds one chimney, wrapped in a sheet of coarse paper and then packed in paper confetti.
All of the wrapping papers bear stamped seals in red ink that carry the same text as the box labels, except that the contents are not described and, in the case of Guang An and Guang Heng, the store's products are stated to include brass. Box labels and wrappings both include the English word "China," showing that the stores were aiming partly at buyers in the U.S. where, since the passage of the McKinley Tariff Act of 1891, all imports had to be marked with the name of the country of origin.
The presence of McKinley Act markings sets an early limit date for many sorts of Asian artifacts. In this case, the lamp chimneys are later than that. Like the other opium-related objects in the Wing Sang cache, they were hidden, indicating that they post-date 1908, the year when opium for smoking became illegal in Canada.
Note1: For the Birmingham connection, see Stewart Culin, "Opium Smoking by the Chinese in Philadelphia," American Journal of Pharmacy, Oct, 1891, p 499.
Note 2: The Chung Collection materials were kindly shown to the editors by Sarah Romney, Archivist
Note 3: The cache, containing much opium-related material that had once been on sale at the Wing Sang shop (on Pender Street in Vancouver) was discovered in the 1990s. Items from it are in the Chung Collection, the Museum of Vancouver, and the Chinese Pioneer Virtual Museum.
Opium lamp chimney boxes, Chung Collection
Wrapped and unwrapped opium lamp chimneys, Chung Collection
Opium lamp chimney wrappers, Chung Collection. Left: Guang Hua Center: Guang An Right: Guang Heng
More smuggling incidents and tales
(For the first batch of incidents and tales, click here)
Operations of the Great Smuggling Ring
On Nov 26 1893, the San Francisco Chronicle published a well-researched feature article on opium smugglers in British Columbia. It offers fine descriptions of opium smuggling from Canada into the U.S. by land and sea. Although by 1893, almost all imported raw opium entered Canada via Vancouver, most of it was immediately shipped over to Victoria for refining. After that it might be smuggled across the border in small sailboats, hidden on board larger steamers, carried overland through the "almost trackless pine forests of Northern Washington," or shipped further east via the Canadian Pacific Railroad, to be brought into the U.S. at many spots in North Dakota, Minnesota, and the areas south of Toronto and Montreal.
The writer of the article may have had personal experience of smuggling by small boat:
"When the smugglers in Victoria decide to run a cargo of 500 pounds of opium into the United States, they select a dark night with a good breeze blowing. They have previously ascertained by telegraph from confederates in Port Townsend just across the water, the whereabouts and probable intentions of the United States revenue cutter that patrols those waters. The intended landing point is also communicated to the accomplice, and every possible precaution taken to make sure the coast is clear. Then, a little after dark, an innocent fishing boat with a pile of nets conspicuously displayed on deck, a couple of men lounging around and one man at the wheel, slips out of the harbor and stands out into the Straits of Fuca. Down below the five-pound [the writer must mean five ounce--editors] cans of opium are safely stowed away, and three or four hardy fellows are lying low, taking a nap the meanwhile. Once outside the nets are stacked away, even inch of canvas is spread, the men tumble up from below, and the voyage begins in earnest. All lights are extinguished, the utmost silence is prserved, and each man takes his post to keep a bright lookout and to handle the sails in an emergency."
When the weather was too rough for small, fast sailboats, the smugglers used the daily steamers that "ply between Victoria and the cities of Seattle and Tacoma. These steamers are big, handsome floating palaces worthy of the Hudson or Long Isand Sound. They leave Victoria after dark, and a little before they leave a Siwash Indian canoe will glide along underneath the wharves and silently slip under the steamer's counter. A port hole will stealthily open and a couple of hundred poundsof opium be shoved aboard and safely stowed away by an accomplice where the inquisitive eye of the customs-house inspector cannot discover it, to be unloaded at Tacoma when favorable opportunity offers."
The writer concludes with a bit of fine writing, indicating (without offering the slightest proof) that that all this activity was under central control:
"The opium ring of the Northwest is a fearful, shadowy, impalpable something; shadowy in form, but most substantial in fact. It makes its presence known, yet is itself unknown. The subordinate members obey a system. They work in unison, yet they know not what is the motive power of this immense machine that is taking oopium from Briotish Columbia into the Unites States with almost mechanical regularity, this giant octopus that is sucking in the revenures rightly due the Government and diverting them to its enrichment."
Interestingly, he does not suggest that this octopus was Chinese. In fact he implies strongly that ultimate control of the opium ring was in the hands of a European-American, "some prominent citizen whose reputation in tje commercial and social world is untainted." The secret agents of the U. S. government "are baffled and, watch as they will, they cannot find evidence enough to bring this man to justice."
Scene in Victoria Harbor, 1893: Do these vessels may be those of smugglers
Victoria-based smuggling ship crossing the Strait of Juan de Fuca
Siwash Indian in canoe passing opium to crew member of a Victoria-Seattle/Tacoma steamship
Opium Retailers in San Francisco, 1900 – 1904.
During the years when opium was legal in San Francisco, many groceries in Chinatown carried it as standard merchandise, along with rice, tea, oil, textiles, etc. But exactly where and how was opium available before the 1906 earthquake? We looked at ads placed in Chungsai Yatpo between 1900 and 1904, one day for each year, and came up with these conclusions.
1. On average, between 20 and 40 shops in Chinatown advertised that they sold opium at retail.
2. Such shops were concentrated along Dupont (later called Grant) Avenue in the 700 to 1000 blocks, in the 700 blocks of Sacramento and Commercial, and here and there along Washington.
Only 12 opium retailers advertised in the newspaper in 1900, a much smaller number compared with later years. This is likely to have been because Chungsai Yatpo was new to San Francisco, having just moved from Los Angeles that year.
When we include the English-language city directories for 1875 and 1894 in our survey, we find interestingly similar numbers: 20 opium retailers in 1875 and 22 in 1894. One conclusion: opium evidently found a good many buyers who could read English but not Chinese. Another conclusion: selling opium may not have been as profitable as one would think. We find many shops that discontinued advertising opium over time. Only one of the 20 opium retailers in 1875 was listed again in the 1894 city directory. And only three of the 22 opium retailers in 1894 advertised again in local Chinese newspapers between 1900 and 1904.
SF Chinatown 1897
Note on illustrations: The chart is by the editors; the drawing is by the great Chicago Tribune cartoonist John T. McCutcheon, from J. A.Higgins, California and Back, Santa Fe Railroad: Chicago, 1897
Quantitative data on 19th century opium use in the U.S. is contradictory. H. H. Kane (1882) quotes the Treasury Department's Bureau of Statistics as saying that in 1880, when the government was still taxing imports of raw as well as refined opium and hence keeping records on both kinds, the U.S. imported 243,000 pounds of raw or “gum” opium, presumably all of it the high-morphine and thus theoretically unsmokable Turkish-Persian-Balkans product, and 77,000 pounds of low-morphine "opium prepared for smoking," most of which came from India via Hong Kong. Considering that much raw opium was used for medical purposes and that Chinese, who must have consumed the bulk of of the prepared opium, constituted less than 1% of the overall American population, it would seem that recreational opium use and addiction were higher among Chinese-Americans than among European- and African-Americans. Those ethnic groups did have their addicts, habituated to the use of Turkish-Persian-Balkans opium in the form of morphine, laudanum, etc. However—if the Treasury Department’s statistics were accurate—, the percentage of white and black addicts had to be lower than among Chinese sojourner-immigrants.
The problem is that we have no way of evaluating the Treasury Department’s statistics. Did it manage to collect duties on a large or small proportion of incoming raw opium? Customs officials were vigilant about the smuggling of refined opium, because when detected it yielded large bounties for offices and individuals. However, contemporary newspapers say nothing about seizures of smuggled raw opium. Perhaps thus was because the duty evaded, and hence the rewards to customs inspectors, were very modest. Before 1890, importers paid $1.00 per pound in duties for raw opium containing “more than nine percentum of morphia.” They paid $6.00 per pound for refined opium with a lower (ideally 3-5%) morphine content. Customs inspectors must have felt that chasing smugglers of high-morphine opium was hardly worth the time and effort.
J. M. Hull's 1885 report to the Iowa Board of Health indicates that much larger quantities of non-smoking high-morphine opium may have been entering the country. He sent questionnaires to the 3000 stores in Iowa that sold opiate drugs. 123 stores responded. They reported a total of 235 addicts (“habitués”), an average of almost 2 per store. 129, a majority, of these addicts were women. 26 injected morphine while the rest took the drug by mouth: 129 morphine, 73 gum opium, 12 laudanum, 6 paregoric, 3 Dovers' powder, and 4 McMunn's Elixir.
Hull extrapolates from his sample to suggest that the existence of 3000 opium-selling stores in Iowa meant that the state had a total of 6000 addicts. At that time, Iowa had a population of 1.7 million, the great majority of whom were white. This would mean that 0.3 percent of Iowans were addicts. China itself as well as Chinese in North America were said to have higher addiction rates: several percent or even more. However, Hull’s figures for whites are surprisingly high. If we accept his calculations, we must conclude that in the 1880s there were as many white addicts in Iowa as there were Chinese, addicted or not, in the whole of Washington State.
To be sure, Hulls’ calculations are no more solid than Kane’s. But they do seem to show that in the 1880s there were a great many white opium addicts in the U.S., that the majority were female, and that nobody worried much about this. The lack of worry was so great, in fact, that under the McKinley Tariff Law of 1890—just when propaganda against opium in Chinatowns was building to a climax—the customs duty on raw high-morphine opium, the kind consumed by whites, was dropped to zero. In contrast, the new tariff for low-morphine smoking opium, as consumed by Chinese, was set first at $6.00 and then at $12.00 per pound. Thus, after 1890, Customs continued to be fascinated by low-morphine smokable opium but ignored imports of high-morphine opium completely. There are no records of quantities imported. The price of such opium undoubtedly fell while quantities rose. Underground chemists, both white and Chinese, must have been working feverishly to learn how to remove most of the morphine from the Turkish-Persian-Balkans drug in order to make it fit for smoking.
Sources: Harry Hubbell Kane, Opium Smoking in America and China, a study of its persistence and effects, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1882; J. M. Hull, "The Opium Habit [in Iowa]" Iowa State Board of Health, 3rd Biennial Report, Des Moines, Iowa, 1885; U. S. Congress, New Customs Law of 1890, New York: Belford Co., 1890; Chinese pharmacy image from Harpers Weekly, 1899-12-08, p 1239.
Chinese pharmacy in San Francisco, 1899. Chinese-Americans bought most of their opium from general stores, but many pharmacists undoubtedly carried it
Iowa drugstore, ca. 1900. In the Midwest, the bulk of opium-containing patent and over-the-counter medications were sold in such stores
How Much Opium Did White Americans Use? The Iowa Case
The Opium Addicts of Albany, NY
In 1880, according to the anti-opium writer H. H. Kane, the city of Albany in upstate New York, with a population of 91,000 people, consumed 3,600 pounds of opium and 5,500 ounces of morphine, the latter equivalent to more than 22,000 ounces of opium. Adding and converting to metric weights, this means that Albany’s annual opium-equivalent consumption came to 2,211,000 grams.
Medical needs might have accounted for a third of this total. The indicated consumption of 8 grams per year for every man, woman and child in the city might be on the high side, considering that .064 grams (= 1 grain) of opium was a normal therapeutic dose in those days. However, even if we accept this high estimate, it still leaves 1,470,000 grams for non-medicinal use. Kane quotes studies showing that the median U.S. addict of that period used about 1.3 grams of opium per day or 485 grams per year. It follows that Albany’s total consumption of non-medicinal opium was enough to supply more than 3000 addicts.
That is a lot of addicts. At about six percent of the adult population, the addiction rate for Albany equaled contemporary addiction rates for China itself. And yet, strangely, no one seems to have been greatly concerned. There are few if any contemporary articles deploring the number of dope-crazed Albanites shambling through the city’s streets or warning decent girls against attempts by depraved European-American addicts to lure them into the vile opium parlors of Albany’s British slums.
Part of the reason for this unconcern may be that no one wanted to read about vice among ordinary European-Americans like themselves. Kane’s own groundbreaking book of 1881 on that subject, Drugs that Enslave: The Opium, Morphine, Chloral and Hashisch Habits, seems not to have sold well. Luckily for him, he was far more successful with his next book, Opium Smoking in America and China, which appeared in 1882. Whereas in 1881 he had dismissed Chinese opium use as “confined entirely to the inhabitants of Eastern countries” and consequently as “of no interest to us,” now he recanted that opinion and announced that opium smoking as practiced by the Chinese was a threat to all white Americans, especially ”the over-curious, foolish, indolent, or willfully vicious.” The 1882 book was an instant hit. Over the next twenty years, it would be read and quoted by numerous anti-opium crusaders.
Statistics for opium use in “one of our large cities” with a population of 91,000 in 1880 and for opium consumption by regular, heavy American users, presumably addicts, come from the preface to Kane’s 1881 book and his page 28. His recantation and emphasis on Chinese as purveyors of opium smoking culture to white Americans appears in the preface to his 1882 book. The city, which Kane does not name, is identified as Albany by G. Maxwell Christine in a letter to Medical and Surgical Reporter, 1881, vol 45: p 417. The Albany house image is from American Architecture and Building News,1879-01-22
Upper middle class European-American addicts in Albany must have lived in homes like this, built in 1879
1895: British Columbia Defends Britain Against Opium War Slander
The following article appeared on the editorial page of the Victoria Daily Colonist on June 18, 1895
"Britain's Character Vindicated
"Very many people believe that England at one time went to war with China in order to force its government to admit British [-Indian] grown opium into its ports...
"Well, the reproach is undeserved. Great Britain never at any time attempted to force opium into China at the bayonet's point or the cannon's mouth. The London Times, in an article which ought to be read by every Briton who has the reputation of his country at heart, proves to a demonstration that the accusation made, no doubt in the first instance by an enemy of Great Britain and the British, and repeated by thousands of well-meaning persons who bewailed the wickedness and greed of the rulers of the nation, is utterly without foundation."
The article goes on to explain that Britain was not angry at Commissioner Lin Zexu's famous destruction of 20,283 chests (2,697,639 lb or 1,223,628 kg) of opium belonging to British merchants in 1839. At first Britain did not even demand compensation. It was only because of Commissioner Lin's insults to British officials and "fantastical outrages," not because of the opium, that Britain went to war. The war-ending Treaty of Nankin (Nanjing) of 1842, the article states, did not even mention opium except to demand, quite incidentally, "compensation for the opium delivered in March, 1839, 'as a ransom for the lives of her Britannic Majesty's superintendent and subjects who had been imprisoned and threatened with death by the Chinese high officials.' "
The article does not mention the amount of money involved: 6 million dollars (in the then-standard Mexican silver dollars) as the value of the opium plus another 15 million dollars to cover other debts and expenses. The British writer may have regarded this 21 million as a trivial sum. It was a lot on this side of the Atlantic, however. In 1845, the total budget of the federal U.S. government came to 27 million, and that was in lower-valued U.S. silver dollars rather than the purer Mexican kind.
The story of Commissioner Lin and the First Opium War between Great Britain and China has been told many times. Readers will find numerous references by entering those terms into Google, Bing, or any other search engine. They will discover that very few of those references accept the Daily Colonist's point of view. Just about all modern historians believe that Britain did indeed fight the war in part, at least, to "force opium into China at the bayonet's point or the cannon's mouth."
Not Forcing Opium into China at the Cannon's Mouth, 1842: The steam-powered British warship Nemesis destroys sail-powered Chinese war junks in the Pearl River estuary. Illustrated London News, 1842
No one really knows how much opium was smoked in North America each year. Even making an informed guess is difficult. Up until 1908-1909, when opium for smoking became illegal in Canada and the U.S., we do know how much raw low-morphine opium was legally entering Canada from India via Hong Kong and Macao. We also know how much refined low-morphine Indian opium was coming into the United States from the same sources. We might even be able to estimate how much of those kinds of opium was entering illegally. However, we run into a blank wall when we try to get an idea of the role played by high-morphine opium from Turkey, Persia, and the Balkans, which entered the U.S. duty-free and unrecorded throughout the 1890s and early 1900s.
The problem is that, by then, Chinese-American (and European-American) chemists seem to have learned how to convert high-morphine opium into a product suitable for smoking:
“In violation of the law, the Chinese are able to flood the local market with an inferior kind of drug made out of Persian and Turkish opium. These kinds in their crude form are admitted free of duty because they contain more than nine
percent of morphia. While useful for medical purposes they have been supposed utterly useless for smoking, the excess of morphia producing skin eruptions and headaches when smoked. But the Chinese were not to be outdone. After a good deal of experimenting they have discovered some process by which the excess of morphia is precipitated and a fairly palatable preparation is made.”
One assumes that this palatability was relative. American-refined opium, at least some of it from Southwest Asia and Southeast Europe, still sold for a much lower price than Indian opium as refined in Canada and, especially, in Hong Kong-Macao. Opium refined in the U.S. did exist, however. It may have continued to play a role in the illicit opium trade after 1908-1909, when opium for smoking (but not for drinking and injecting) was banned.
Frederick J. Masters, "The Opium Traffic in California," The Chatauquan, A Monthly Magazine, October 1896-March 1897, p 60. The image is from Wikipedia Commons
Triumph of Turn-of-the-Century Chemistry: Making Turkish-Persian-Balkans Opium into a Smokable Product
Turkish opium seller, 1845
Direct Evidence of a Middle East/Balkans to Pacific Northwest Connection
The first piece of direct evidence for such a connection that the editors have seen is a letter in the records of the Lee family, as preserved in the Chung Collection at the University of British Columbia. The letter is addressed to Vancouver’s Lee Yuen (or Yune) Company. As this earlier letterhead shows, Lee Yuen had been a significant opium refiner and seller before 1908, when the drug was banned in Canada.
The following letter, written in 1914 by E. Lesic in Belgrade, is clearly an attempt at a blind sale and does not imply that the Lee Yuen Company stayed in the opium business after it became illegal. However, we may justifiably conclude that Lesic knew that at least some formerly legal Chinese dealers in Canada still sold opium secretly and that they were able to convert the high-morphine Balkan-Turkish variety of the drug into a low-morphine mixture suitable for Chinese smokers.
The letter is in German. It informs the addressee that the sender, Em. Lesic, regularly has large quantities of opium for sale and that he will offer it to the addressee from time to time. At the time of writing, he has 6,000 okas [16,500 pounds] of local opium available at his warehouse in Köprülü [now Veles, in the Republic of Macedonia] for which he would be pleased to receive orders. Here is the full text, transcribed:
'Seller of the famous "L. Y." Brand opium'
Em. Lesic
Belgrad
Gundulicev venac 21
Belgrad, 9./22.Jänner 1914Herren
Lee, Yune et Co.
Vancouver.
Canada.
Ich teile Ihnen höfl.mit, dass ich ständig grösseres Quantum Opiums zum Verkaufe zur Disposition habe und wäre es mir angenehm von Zeit zu Zeit von Ihrem w/Offerten im Besitze zu sein.Zur Zeit habe ich in meinem Lagern in Köprülü cca 6.000.-Okas Opium, übliche Köprülüer Ware, und würde mich freuen Ihrer diesbezüglichen Offerts entgegenzusehenIch zeichne Hochachtungsvoll E Lesic[Note: Macedonia was part of Turkey until 1885. Opium was first grown there (in "Roumelia") in the 1840s using seed from Izmir, according to P. L. Simmons (“The Trade in Opium,” Bulletin of Pharmacy, February 1893, p 66. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has more on Macedonian opium--see http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Opium#Turkey)]
The illustrated items are from the Rare Books & Special Collections and University Archives of the University of British Columbia. The Lesic letter is from the Lee Fonds, Box 3, Folder 7. There are several copies of the Lee Yune letterhead in the same Fonds, Folder "1908 Steamship."
