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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

References for "The Coastal Opium Trade in Fujian"

Works Cited:

First Historical Archives of China: Beijing, China
Junji chu hanwen lufu zhouzhe (Grand Council Chinese-Language Palace Memorial Copies). Abbreviated LFZZ.

Jardine Matheson & Company Archives: Cambridge University Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, England
Accounting and Related Papers. Abbreviated JM A.
In-Correspondence. Abbreviated JM B.
Out-Correspondence. Abbreviated JM C.
Legal Documents. Abbreviated JM F.
Chinese Documents. Abbreviated JM H.
Miscellaneous Correspondence. Abbreviated JM K.

Bauer, Rolf. 2019. The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India. Brill.

Bickers, Robert, and Hans van de Ven, compilers. 2004-2008. China and the West, the Maritime Customs Service Archive from the Second Historical Archives of China, Nanjing. Woodbridge, Conn.: Thomson Gale, Primary Source Microfilm. Abbreviated CMC Film.

Ghosh, Amitav. 2008. Sea of Poppies. Viking Press.

le Pichon, Alain, ed. 2006. China Trade and Empire: Jardine, Matheson & Co. And the Origins of British Rule in Hong Kong 1827-1843. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Trocki, Carl. 1999. Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750-1950. Oxon: Routledge.

Yapian zhanzheng zai min tai shiliao xuanbian (Fujian-Taiwan Opium War Materials). 1982. Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chuban she.

Further reading on opium in Asia:

Baumler, Alan. 2008. The Chinese and Opium under the Republic: Worse the Floods and Wild Beasts. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Chang, Hsin-Pao. 1964. Commissioner Lin and the Opium War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Chen, Yung-fa. 1995. “The Blooming Poppy under the Red Sun: The Yan’an Way and the Opium Trade.” In New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution, edited by Tony Saich and Hans van de Ven, 263-298. New York: M.E. Sharpe.

Deng, Kent G. 2008. “Miracle or Mirage? Foreign Silver, China’s Economy, and Globalization from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries.” Pacific Economic Review 13, no. 3: 320-58.

Dikötter, Frank, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun. 2004. Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fairbank, John King. 1953. Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast, The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842-1854. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Fay, Peter Ward. 1997 [1975]. The Opium War, 1840-1842. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Foster, Anne L.. 2000. “Prohibition as Superiority: Policing Opium in South-East Asia, 1898-1925.” The International History Review 22, no. 2: 253-273.

Grace, Richard J. 2014. Opium and Empire: The Lives and Careers of William Jardine and James Matheson. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

He, Liping. 2007. “Yapian maoyi yu baiyin wailiu guanxi zhi cai jiantao (Reexamining the relationship of the opium trade and silver outflows).” Shehui kexue zhanxian 1: 63-80.

Irigoin, Maria Alejandra. 2013. “A trojan horse in Daoguang China? Explaining the flows of silver in and out of China.” Economic History working papers, 173/13. London: Department of Economic History, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Kim, Diana. 2020. Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition Across Southeast Asia. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kingsberg, Miriam. 2013. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lin, Man-Houng. 2004. “Late Qing Perceptions of Native Opium.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 64, no. 1: 117-144.

Ma, Mozhen, ed. 1998. Zhongguo jindu shiliao 1749 nian - 1949 nian (Historical sources on drug prohibition in China, 1749-1949). Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chuban she.

Macauley, Melissa. 2009. “Small Time Crooks: Opium, Migrants and the War on Drugs in China, 1819-1860.” Late Imperial China 30, no. 1: 1-47.

Madancy, Joyce. 2003. The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Marshall, Jonathan. 1976. “Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 8, no. 3: 19-48.

Martin, Brian. 1996. The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Brook, Timothy, and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds. 2000. Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Owen, David Edward. 1968. British Opium Policy in China and India. Hamden, CT: Archon Books.

Platt, Stephen. 2018. Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age. New York: Knopff.

Rimner, Steffen. 2018. Opium’s Long Shadow: From Asian Revolt to Global Drug Control. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Rush, James R. 2014. Opium to Java: Revenue Farming and Chinese Enterprise in Colonial Indonesia, 1860-1910. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Scheltema, J.F.. 1907. “The Opium Trade in the Dutch East Indies, I.” American Journal of Sociology 13, no. 1: 79-112.

Shen Yanqing. 2013. Heyin zhimin zhengfu yapian shuishou zhengce ji qidui zhaowa huaren shehui de yingxiang (From Opium Farm System to Opium Régie: A Study of Opium Policy in Netherlands East Indies and its Impact on Chinese Society in Java). Xiamen: Xiamen University Press.

Slack, Edward. 2001. Opium, State, and Society: China’s Narco-Economy and the Guomindang, 1924-1937. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Trocki, Carl. 2000. “Drugs, Taxes, and Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia.” In Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952, edited by Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, 79-105. Berkeley: University of California Press.

-----. 1990. Opium and Empire: Chinese Society in Colonial Singapore, 1800-1910. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

-----. 2011. “Opium as a Commodity in the Chinese Nanyang Trade.” In Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia, edited by Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-chin Chang, 84-106. Durham: Duke University Press.

Wright, Ashley. 2014. Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia: Regulating Consumption in British Burma. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Yang, Timothy M. 2021. A Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Zheng, Yangwen. 2005. The Social Life of Opium in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The Coastal Opium Trade in 1830s Fujian 74 Peter D. Thilly image_header 4897 2021-09-30T10:33:29-04:00 Lintin 22.4167, 113.8000 Xiamen 24.48535, 118.08850 24.4167, 118.12743 24.35603, 118.15146 Shenhu Bay 24.6500, 118.6667 Canton 23.1167, 113.2500 22.40468, 113.80462 22.39706, 113.63021 22.28973, 113.94126 22.4142, 113.91534 Bombay 18.9750, 72.8258 London 51.5142, -0.0931 Quanzhou 24.86830, 118.67729 24.60943, 118.45738 24.52075, 118.56243 24.63106, 118.66553 24.66804, 118.67326 24.84062, 118.70554 24.82504, 118.76116 24.87738, 118.89505 25.03177, 119.05092 Yakou 24.66782, 118.64392 Beijing 39.92284, 116.40120 Shantou 23.35219, 116.67682 23.43193, 117.09911 Macao 22.17730, 113.54689 Yakou Village, Shenhu Bay 24.663469444444, 118.64524166667 Fuzhou 26.0614, 119.3061 Shanghai 31.24063, 121.48999 Singapore 1.2833, 103.8500 Calcutta 22.5626, 88.3630 Patna 25.59409, 85.13756 Benares 25.3167, 83.0104 Malwa 22.71956, 75.85772 Aceh 4.69513, 96.74939 Goa 15.29932, 74.12399 Zanzibar -6.16519, 39.19891 Mombasa -4.04347, 39.6682 Hosur 11.12712, 78.65689 Penang 5.41413, 100.32875 Manila 14.59951, 120.98421 Chaozhou 23.6567, 116.62275 Aden 22.19874, 113.54387 Lascars 12.78549, 45.01865 1832-1838 Peter D. Thilly Jardine-Matheson Yakou Village Fujian Jinjiang County Opium War
This module tells the story of how a transnational coalition of maritime traders came together to operate one of the largest illicit drug markets in history. The importation of opium into China prior to 1832 occurred exclusively in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province, where Fujianese and Cantonese ships would load up on the drug for delivery to other parts of the empire.
By the late 1830s, a huge portion of the import trade had migrated north into Fujian province. Every day after 1834 or so there were around a dozen British ships permanently anchored in strategic bays along the Fujian coast, importing tens of thousands of chests of opium directly into Fujian and exporting jaw-dropping quantities of treasure.
This module allows users to explore this dramatic explosion in the Fujianese opium trade, by focusing on the local story of Shenhu Bay in Jinjiang County, and the interactions between the Shi Lineage of Yakou Village and the Rees brothers of Jardine-Matheson and Dent & Co.
Module Layout
1. Navigating Sources and Mapping the Opium Trade. Introduces the goals of the module, provides necessary background information, and summarizes my interpretation of the archival sources that make up the two main body paths of the module.
2. The Case Against Shi Hou: A Qing Document. Constructed out of a primary source from the Qing territorial administration, a criminal case against a man called Shi Hou for escorting British opium ships to his hometown of Yakou Village.
3. The Jardine-Matheson Global Network. A re-creation of the largest and most influential British opium-trading firm, divided up conceptually and geographically, interspersed with images, videos, and primary source text from the Jardine-Matheson archive.
4. A Spatial History of Profit. Three short essays on a spatial history of profit and corruption on the Qing maritime frontier.
5. Conclusion: Space as Process. The concluding page to the module.
Link: Jardine-Matheson Archives Catalog (holdings are at the Cambridge University Library)
Link: First Historical Archives in Beijing

Click here for a list of references for this module, which is also available from the module's Conclusion page.