Most of the material I've seen discussing this topic deal more with the military and/or free trade aspect of the opium wars, and only mention that 'it was a terrible epidemic' without ever giving any hard numbers.
Are those available though? Are there any educated guesses as to what proportion of the population was addicted to the stuff, and how it impacted daily life?
Thanks for your time, if I can clarify anything please let me know!
So, the big issue here is what we mean by an 'epidemic'. How many people, out of a population of around 400 million, must be opium users before we reach a state of 'epidemic'? Or is the total amount of opium being consumed more important? Or the amount of opium per user? Or per capita in general? Need we also account for distinctions in class, gender and ethnicity? There is no good answer. An 'epidemic' is a highly subjective and charged term when it comes to the proliferation of any narcotic substance. Have we in the 'Western' world not got, in some way, a 'coffee epidemic'? Hence, I will not be explicitly making any value judgement on China's opium consumption in this way.
The hard data for opium by weight is relatively simple to find: The year before the Opium War began, in 1838, 35,736 chests of opium (about 5 million lb or 2,300 metric tonnes) was exported from India to China.^1 This figure only regards higher-grade Patna and lower-grade Malwa opium from India, and does not include small-scale domestic production of low-grade opium (although that was then still very minor) or the movement of top-grade Levantine opium from the Ottoman Empire via American traders (which ultimately made up less than 10% of all opium shipped to China).^2 (Additionally, the source I am using conflicts with certain others, which leads me to believe that the figure may actually be too high, by only accounting for production at the source rather than the amount delivered to the destination.)
But if we try to translate this to a number of 'addicts', we again reach a problem. The use of the word 'addict' is again both ambiguous and charged. What defines an addict? Even if we do have an agreed definition, what metrics can be used to determine who was or was not an addict, and how could we work that out from what our sources tell us? Are there people who consumed opium whom we would not consider addicts? How much opium stands between 'addiction' and sobriety? Again, we can try to work out the number of users in general, but leave aside the subjective judgement of who constituted an 'addict'.
Estimates, in fact, vary wildly as to how many people were using opium regularly by 1839. Platt states that in 1831, around 19,000 chests were able to sustain 150,000 'habitual users'. Platt does not go into detail as to what he means, and as I don't have my print copy ready I can't check his source at present.^2 Still, if we take him at his word and we extrapolate forwards to 1838, we could say that China had perhaps 300,000 'habitual users' based on the estimates Platt refers to. This number seems too low, however, as that would mean an average daily consumption of 20 grams of opium per user. According to a survey done by the French doctor Liebermann at Tianjin in the latter part of the 1800s, 1250 of his 2000 respondents confessed to a daily intake of 10-20 grams per day, whilst another 650 or so claimed to smoke 8 grams a day or less, suggesting an average closer to 10. Liebermann's figure is even higher than that given by an American surgeon, Robert Coltman, who noted that, in the 1880s, recreational users in Shaanxi typically used 4-8 grams a day, 12 in extreme cases.^4 Obviously, we must take these numbers with a pinch of salt when going back to 1839, but they do give a reasonable idea of individual consumption rates. There were those at the time who claimed that opium was more broadly smoked, and this could be taken to extremes: Huang Juezi, who in 1836 proposed a plan to eradicate the opium issue by executing anyone still found smoking after a year, estimated that perhaps 1% of the country's population – 4 million people – were opium smokers.^3 The inherent problem with trying to work out the quantity of opium smokers in China is that, being an illegal activity, opium smoking was not particularly well documented from a statistical standpoint. Consumption rates have to be extrapolated from a relatively limited set of data points from disparate regions and time periods, and so we lack the comprehensive information about rates of consumption to be able to give a precise estimate for actual numbers of smokers.
What complicates this is the fact that opium was smoked for a number of reasons. While opium was, to an extent, a recreational drug, and used at social gatherings in a way similar to how wine has been used in Europe, it was also the closest thing then available to a panacea, acting as a painkiller (through its morphine content) as well as a cough suppressant and antimalarial remedy (due to its anarcotine content). In addition, at this point medicinal opium was also consumed differently, being administered either orally or as a paste on the skin.^4 Is someone who uses opium for medical reasons an addict in the same way as someone who smokes it recreationally?
It must also be remembered that recreational opium was an elite pursuit. Opium smoking is inherently highly wasteful, in that the burning destroys much of the active substance. Hence it became a sign of conspicuous consumption. The eschewing of madak, which was a tobacco-opium mixture, for pure opium was borne in part out of the fact that the undiluted opium was costlier and thus a better status symbol. The paraphernalia surrounding opium usage could be extremely extravagant, and in fact many opium-using households had a servant specifically for preparing opium pipes. It was perhaps the proliferation of opium among elite bureaucrats, rather than the population at large, that made it such a useful scapegoat for national issues, as it was disproportionately visible to the decision-making bodies of the time. Indeed, in 1820 the future Daoguang Emperor wrote poetry lauding the recreational use of opium.^3 ^4 Daoguang's later decision to initiate a national crackdown began in part because of the discovery of an imperial family member's opium stash in the Forbidden City and in part due to the seizure of about 4 tonnes of opium at Tianjin, the port of Beijing^5 – something which suggests especially strongly the relatively elite consumption of the drug. Can something be called a national 'epidemic' if 'addict' behaviour is primarily found among the elite?
From an economic standpoint, too, the extent to which opium was a significant factor in the decline of the Qing economy can and has also been called into question. In particular, a global downturn in silver production due to Mexican independence disrupting the main region of silver mining resulted in reduced flow of silver into Qing China, which had always been a net importer, and thus led to increased costs of imports relative to exports for much of the former half of the 19th century. Indeed, opium imports continued to increase after 1842, yet the Qing would more than recover their debts by the 1850s and went on to stay in the black on trade for most of the rest of the century – coinciding with the recovery of the Mexican silver industry.^6 ^2 ^3 ^4
So, in conclusion, in 1839 the opium 'epidemic' may or may not have had particularly serious consequences, may or may not have involved 'addiction', and may or may not have even been a thing. Hope that helped!
Sources, Notes and References: