248. Victorian Narcos: Sex, Drugs, & The Opium Agency (Ep 2)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Zirimpol. Very good. Now, if you missed the first episode, what we have been talking about is the relationship of opium and cups of tea. Not an obvious one, necessarily. Well, I don't know how many of the people walk their dogs out there. In an opium maze sipping cups of tea. A bit novel to us. But we were talking in the last episode about how tea had become such an overwhelming desire and product for the British. The British loved it so much. They were buying so much of it. They were spending so much money on it. 90 % of cargo was tea.

1:15And so there's suddenly this thought that, hang on a minute, all of our money is leaving us to go to China and they're not buying anything from us. And now this will sound quite familiar to anyone who's been listening, as William pointed out last episode, to the kind of conversations going on about Trump tariffs. You know, if there isn't a balance of payments, how is this fair? And that starts occurring to the British. And I just wanted to read you something about, you know, how tea matters to the British, just to remind you, because as you know, I did matrol for really interesting things written about tea.

1:44And this is slightly later. So this is William Gladstone, and I I couldn't find the source of it, but it is attributed to him from some sort of 1800s tea books. They actually put this in from him. If you are cold, tea will warm you. If you are too heated, it will cool you. If you're depressed, it will cheer you. If you're excited, it will calm you. So, you know, this love affair with tea, which is such a quintessentially, let's face it, British thing. I've just come back from, you know, France, but it's all about the coffee. Nobody wants to give you a cup of tea. I've just come back from Hong Kong and I'm sipping a very nice mug of, I think it's called Orchid Oolong, which I bought in my research there for this episode.

2:28Very nice and very fitting considering in the last episode, we talked about your ancestor who came up with this eureka moment. So, you know what? I have an idea. This is how we can balance our payments. What we could do is some kind of triangular trade where we give them stuff they want. And then, you know, we get the tea maybe at a better rate, a better tariff. So, he identifies, your Alexander de Rimpol ancestor, that, you know what, we could probably do pepper because they like pepper in China. And we could probably do opium because they're starting to like opium. And these are the seeds of what will become the opium war.

3:07We should say that this was just because he spotted that the trade already existed, that Southeast Asian people were successfully trading their products. Literally what I said. But it wasn't like he was coming up with a new idea. It was an old idea that he just burnt. They like it. They like the pepper. They like the opium. Lordy. Anyway, but so this becomes an idea that will become the basis for a very important trade and a very bloody trade, it turns out. But before we get into all of that, before we get into all of that, I want you to tell us a bit about opium itself, because you sort of mentioned that David Cameron visit where him and George Osborne wore poppies for Remembrance Day to China, not for one second thinking this is actually a symbol of the great humiliation that China still reels from today.

3:59And it all went slightly pear-shaped or poppy-shaped. Where do poppies actually come from? Tell us the origin of this opium trade. Probably for something which is associated now very much in the Western mind with the East. Opium dreams brings to mind Kublai Khan and sort of exotica. Afghanistan and until recently the Taliban. Taliban doing white poppies and people cutting that little slit in the poppy to let the ooze out and so on. So probably the earliest example that has been discovered of Papova somniferum, which is specifically the opium poppy. You did that very well, by the way. It's very good.

4:42Thank you. It's very good. Was, of all places, Switzerland. Poppies begin at Switzerland, which kind of makes sense if you think of, you know, I suppose, you know, the poppies of Flanders. You know, it is a European thing. It's not something that's necessarily associated with Turkey or China. On many motorway verges even today. Exactly. You know, you'll see it. Exactly that. And so the first place where specifically the opium poppy, the poppy which produces the opium, was found in ancient lake beds in Switzerland. at places like Lake Geneva. And lake dwellers living on crannags, those sort of artificial islands that Iron Age people built into lakes, as early as 3 ,100 BC, were keeping supplies of poppy seeds, poppy seed cake, and poppy capsules.

5:34And they're probably using it for its either medicinal or narcotic qualities. And we know that explicitly once we get into the literate world of early Greece. And in the Mycenaean period, around 2000 BC, opium from opium poppies is being mixed with wine as part of a kind of shamanistic mother goddess cult. This is the cult of Demeter, isn't it? So mother of Persephone. Exactly. Yeah. I've read about those. Yeah. Well done. Yes. That's exactly right. And you get it very explicitly in the Odyssey. Helen mixes opium with wine to help warriors forget the passions and traumas of the Trojan War, all that sort of stuff.

6:22But Greek literature is full of references to the hallucinogenic qualities of the poppy. And it spreads apparently from Greece to Samaria. That's Mesopotamia. And from Mesopotamia, where you get references, for example, to the Assyrians using this stuff, it goes to Egyptians. Okay, because in Egypt, I know that Thebes was known for its opium fields, wasn't it? There were vast expanses of growing opium. And there are descriptions in some of those Egyptian freezes of the white opium fields of Thebes, and they talk about Theban poppies. But from there, probably with the Arabs, it spreads to India.

7:12And in India, it's used in war for the first time. The Rajputs in particular specialize in this idea of taking opium before battle and then rushing into the thickest of the combat, insensible to danger, which is something that still happens. In our Mughal series, we were talking about those terrible massacres when the Mughals take Ramth and Bor and so on. There's that institution of Joha that they have when they think they're definitely going to be defeated and they can't win. And they all put on orange or saffron clothing and rush out in a great sort of haze of glory. Yeah. I mean, just on that, I don't know if this is right or not but we did talk about war elephants being given copious amounts of alcohol before they were sent to go and rampage and run in unpredictable i mean any indication i mean no genuinely was it sort of a mixture of opium as well to sort of send them slightly you know de lally before they send them out yes but it's very interesting that it's definitely it's being eaten in india opium is something you don't mix with drink and you don't smoke it you eat it and i've been served opium in Rajasthan by it's still, if you go to one of those old fashioned.

8:30Sorry, you just drop that into a conversation like, well, you know, that time I was offered opium. Yes, do go on. It's not done as a hallucinogenic or a sort of, you know, drug frenzy thing. It's something in traditional Rajasthani society to this day. Right. That when there's a wedding or there's a kind of ceremonial occasion when guests arrive and you want to honour them, you have this tea ceremony. And that happens also with, I've seen, I wrote one of my books in a Rajasthani fort near Jodhpur, city of Jinns, years and years ago. And even when parties of tenants were coming in from distant villages to the tako, the kind of local squire that I was staying with, I had a little room at the back where I was writing.

9:10And these peasants would come and he would hang up this thing that looked a bit like an old sock and he put opium in it. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. With so many questions. Okay, so, wait a minute. So this is… I forgot all this. Yes, I do. But now I'm not going to let you forget because it's really interesting. So this opium that's offered, it's different to bang, which is the stuff that people drink. Holy, which is another, it's a narcotic that makes you sort of wild and carefree and lowers inhibition. So holy is the festival of colours, just for those who don't know.

9:44And you have this drink called bung before, which I've never had, but I've seen people who have. I've had quite a lot of bung over the years. Confessions of an opium eater has nothing on this podcast Bug is just hashish It's just hash, that's right That's what I thought Indy for hash Which is a wild plant in India I have great hedges full of the stuff growing outside my farm I just feel that a cavity search is in your future When you come to London next I mean, just mystical powers kicking in But when you were offered the opium in the sock Just talk me through what that was So the opium in the sock was how?

10:22I'll tell you exactly what happened. So I remember this one particular occasion when there was a group of villagers. I can't remember why they were coming, but it was a formal visit by a group of village elders to this wonderful man who's dead now called Takosab, who's the local squire. And he received them formally in his reception room. And everyone was sitting on the ground. And water is poured into the sock, rather like making sort of tea. It's not actually a sock. It's kind of like a little cotton container. and he then spoons opium into each of their mouths as a form of welcome. And I think that's an ancient ceremony.

10:57I think that's something that's been going on. So what happens? It had no effect on me at all because it's very small quantities. But no, to be honest, I'd pretend I was sort of running in the ground and having strange hallucinations. But no, I mean, maybe a little bit sort of spaced out, but nothing dramatic. I feel this has not much to do with history, but very interesting. Anyway, so it's prevalent spreads in India sort of crossing over and just to move us sort of back to Europe and closer to where the British get their hands on it and start thinking that this is a good commodity to trade and balance payments with China.

11:30The Portuguese are also sort of rumbling around India, sort of overlapping slightly. It is in 1509 when you've got the the conquering of Goa that takes place. I take it that's when they too see, oh, opium, hang on a minute, if they're exporting it, there's money, it's a cash crop. Does it go back that far that the Portuguese start trading it? The Portuguese bizarrely are in Goa earlier than the Mughals. They precede the Mughals. And the guy who conquers Goa for the Portuguese is a guy called Albuquerque. and he arrives in India in 1509 and he writes to his boss, the king of Portugal. He says, if your highness would believe me, I would order poppies to be sown in all the fields of Portugal and command afyam, as he calls it, to be made.

12:19We call it afim. So we call it afim. Afim is no phoepium in Hindi, yeah. And all that comes from the original Greek. It's basically versions of the Greek word. Right. And anyway, he says this afyam is the best merchandise it obtains in these places. And this is the key quote. The people of India are lost without it if they do not eat it. So contrary to some accounts, there's some post-colonial scholars that say this is basically a rackety British invention. And that's not true. It's certainly true that the British ramp it up to a completely unprecedented level. But it's that their trade, like everything the British did, is based on Mughal precedents.

12:55It wasn't just the British that realized this. And so which takes us to the question of why is it such a big deal in China? And the answer is sex, bizarrely, which isn't something that you perhaps necessarily associate. Well, yes, you do. Sex and drugs. We just don't have the rock and roll. That's all. Sex and drugs and rock and roll, I suppose. Yeah. So specifically, there is a whole thing in Ming China. Ming China is that the Ming dynasties are the kind of contemporaries of the Mughals. And it's all about the art of sex. And it's a kind of Sting and Trudy styler kind of thing. It's tantric. It's the idea that it slows everything down.

13:31and opium does that apparently. I just bought a book, funnily enough, about this, which is a whole book on Chinese opium. It's called The Social Life of Opium. And there's a whole chapter on the Ming obsess about this. It's obviously considered to be the height of cultural sophistication, just like the positions in the Kama Sutra are such a big thing in early India. Getting your opium into your sex life in the Chinese court is a big deal. Okay, so we've established that there is an appetite. We talked about this a little bit in the last episode. We also talked about how the Dutch were quick to jump on and the Portuguese had already jumped on, but it's the British.

14:12So, we talked about your ancestor suggesting that this might be part of a triangular trade, but then Warren Hastings is the man who kind of wades in, isn't he? I mean, so Warren Hastings in 1773, who's then the governor general of India, sort of formalizes his entry into the opium market. Talk about that because I know you know an awful lot about Warren Hastings. So Alexander Drumpel and this idea of the triangular trade is contemporary with the young Robert Clive, 1740s. Right, okay. And of course, Clive changes the whole conception of things because he conquers Bengal. And it's in Bengal, which at that period includes both modern Bangladesh and the modern Indian state of Bihar, as well as the modern state of West Bengal.

14:58It is in Bihar that the Mughals had had the center of their opium trade. So the British, as part of their expansion, not as part of a deliberate ploy, but through the battles of Plasic in 1757 and Buxa, which is, I think, 1764, capture the big opium-growing headquarters of Mughal India. Without knowing, really, what they've got. I mean, it's part of the territory. Well, I think the merchants know this because before they conquer it, there's already East India Company factories in places like Patna. And they're shut out of the opium trade because it's a Mughal monopoly. And they're chafing at this because they want to be part of it and not allowed it.

15:40And then, of course, the moment comes when after battles - There's no barrier anymore. There's no barrier, and they swoop in. And at the same time as the British are realizing it, you mentioned the Dutch. The Dutch have realized at the same time that this is a big deal. And the VOC, which is the Dutch East India Company, have started now trading opium to China from Java. and one of the beneficiaries of this in the mid-18th century is William of Orange who we last saw at the Battle of the Boyne in the Irish series. Wearing his Dutch hat he becomes a member of a VOC club called the Afimian or the Opium Society which basically is a kind of investing club where people put money in and they get narco cash out of it and William of Orange is a member of this and he receives substantial number of shares from the Dutch East Indies.

16:39So, same time that the British are suddenly finding themselves ruling the main opium fields of India, the Dutch have already realized that this is a big deal, that they can make a lot of money. I'm just sort of chuckling to myself because if there was a Mad Men type advertising campaign, it would be, you know, opium stocks, the yield is high, so very high, higher than you can imagine. You're lost on advertising. But look, back, back previously on this conversation. So I want to know a little bit more about when London takes the idea of the triangular trade and decides to really push it and push it hard.

17:19Tell me when that happens. So something is happening at this period in China, which adds to the attractiveness of opium. Now, as you know, tobacco is part of the discovery of the new world, that people are growing and smoking tobacco in North and South America. And that travels with the Portuguese to Southeast Asia. and at some point people who've been eating and drinking opium drinks realize that opium is much much stronger and a completely different deal if you smoke it and there's a whole sort of just like with you know we're talking in the last episode about how tea has a whole tea ceremony attached to it there's a whole business where you get raw opium you dissolve it in water you strain it in a copper metal until it sort of thickens up.

18:15And then you roll a little ball of this syrupy, blackish substance called chundu into an opium pipe. And this happens for the first time. Someone sort of invents this process in the mid 18th century. In China. In China. This isn't in China. I think in Java originally. Yeah, in Southeast Asia, but it's exported pretty quickly to China. It's the clear image that we have, largely thanks to Hollywood, but also written accounts of opium dens where this is exactly what happens. These pipes, people sitting around on low cushions with each other. Well, let me give you my most thrilling discovery, which I got from a wonderful book, which we haven't talked about the books we've been reading.

18:59At the top of the list, Amitav Ghosh's wonderful book, Smoke and Ashes, which is a wonderful book on the opium wars. And he has this line, which I hand-read, that the term hipster comes from this period because you lie in an opium dem on your hips. Your hip. That's it. Isn't that great? It is. It's one of those things you read and you go, come on, Amitabh, that can't be true. Come on, that's bullshit. But it's Amitabh, go show it. It's legit. But apparently, so you take a small ball of the stuff, you put it at the end of a needle, you put the needle into a flame, and then you put this sort of gunji, almost ignited, bubbling little ball of opium into a pipe and you inhale it and it kind of knocks you out.

19:47It's the strongest possible way. And so for the first time, opium, which has already been a problem in India, even in its eaten and drunken form, as we know from these pictures of addicts, becomes an epidemic. You get the world's first really serious opioid epidemic. So at the same time as the British are looking to China as a way of solving their balance of payments problem, by pure, well, if you like, good fortune for the British, terrible fortune for the Chinese, there is a massive increase in demand because suddenly you've got, just like with the opioid epidemic, with the Sacklers and fentanyl and all that stuff in America 10 years ago.

20:30So in mid-18th century China, you suddenly get a massive demand for opium. So all these different things are coming together randomly. But you also have a backlash from governments. I mean, if you see your youth, largely your youth, insensate and just the terrible problems that go along with opium addiction in particular, because it is so addictive. Don't the Chinese actually say, you know what, we're not having this anymore. Don't they ban opium at one point in China? It seems that there's horses for courses. Yes, officially it is banned and you do have sporadic attempts. Yeah, 1729. I thought they said it's against the law.

21:07You're not allowed to do it anymore. The court apparently, and even some of the emperors as young men are taking this. Right. These hipsters are taking it. And it's associated, as I say, with sort of courtly sex. It's something that sophisticated young men like to do. That's so mad, isn't it? Yeah. But there's a law against it, but the rich and the powerful can circumvent. Don't bother with the law. Exactly that. So no different from today in that sense. But that's when, I guess it's 1729, when the band comes in, that you get that whole image of the dens. you know that people sort of if it is against the law you'll have to go to the back streets or you'll have to go somewhere else you know sort of seedy areas of drug taking which in many ways kind of makes it worse because it's happening out of sight and so you know the addiction problem is is voracious and you can't stop it it's like playing whack-a-mole if it's all in the back streets and you can't really sort of keep up with it so this is going on simultaneously you've got several different things happening you've got on one hand the british have conquered the opium growing areas of india secondly the javanese stroke the dutch have found that there is a new way to take opium as a as a smoke and an epidemic breaks out in china and it's in 1773 you mentioned warren Hastings.

22:30He's the guy who pulls all these different cords together. And in 1773, he takes over the monopoly. Historians dispute this. I think that the Mughals did have a monopoly on opium growing, and Sha 'alam, the emperor who I read about in the Anarchy, certainly thinks that they do. And Hastings, who's a historian and a scholar of Persian, discovers this and uses it as a legal pretext to take a monopoly control of the opium of the areas that the company now controls. Now, as far as he's concerned, this is just a way of shutting out the French and the Dutch merchants. And it also means that the farmers who you're getting it from have got less competition.

23:17They can't play off the British against other... They can't make a profit if the prices are fixed and you've got only a monopoly, one person who's buying from you, you're also at the mercy of the buyer. Because if the buyer says, right, I'm going to drop the price because we're the only ones buying, what are you going to do as a farmer? You're going to have to go along with it if they're the only ones you're allowed to sell to. Exactly. Warren Hastings makes it a monopoly in 1773. Then one of his successors is called Lord Cornwallis, who's the guy who's defeated by Washington in our American series.

23:45and then gets reappointed by the company and becomes governor general in India twice. He takes the opium monopoly. He doesn't auction it out as Warren Hastings had done, but he forms a formal government agency in 1797 to control the growing of opium. And this makes it something which the East India Company and by extension the British government have got a direct interest in. Is it just called the Opium Agency? Is that what's on the letterhead? The Opium Agency will be on their calling cards. How extraordinary. At the same time, the merchants in Canton begin to put two and two together. They're no longer doing this thing of stopping off in Southeast Asia and maybe buying some opium as part of their package of goods that they're going to trade to the Chinese.

24:39They just take the opium direct from Bihar. They've got a monopoly. The foreigners are shut out. The farmers have got no alternative but to sell to the government. It's a government exclusive monopoly. And a character called Mr. Wheeler, who according to the East India Company papers is, quote, an officer and an influential member of the community, comes up with this idea to use the company's own opium monopoly to balance the flow of silver out of India to China. Wheeler Dealer. Wheeler Dealer. I mean, it is Wheeler Dealer. Very nice. So in 1767, Wheeler Dealer and Colonel Watson put this through the council in Calcutta and it becomes the formal policy.

25:26So from this point, you've got the opium agency, which is initially only about a million people are under its control. But in the course of the 19th century, and we'll see this in future episodes, it controls not just modern Bihar, but everything as far as Agra. In other words, most of the gangetic plane gets given over to opium and it becomes an absolutely massive deal. It's forbidden to everybody except people in this area, and they are given often no alternative but to grow open. And so even in times of famine, for example, people are still being told that they can't plant food. I mean, it's sort of a similar pattern that goes on with indigo later when Bihar farmers in particular are told to grow indigo because it's needed for the cotton trade, for Cottonopolis in Manchester.

26:16Let's take a break and come back after the break because now that they've got the monopoly, they've got the supply, and we've talked about the demand, even though a law has been passed in China. What happens when those two things meet? A ban on Opium, but also a desire to sell Opium to China. It's not going to end well, is it?

27:01Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about the monopoly on opium production and distribution that the British have now taken on, thanks to Warren Hastings in India and all of the territory that the British have won over and dominated in India, including these huge poppy growing areas where farmers are given absolutely no choice about whether they're going to grow this cash crop or not. and often to the detriment of the people who kind of need to feed themselves and their families. No crops that you can eat, but crops that we can sell. So the scale of this, I just want to get the Opium Agency, which absolutely unashamedly calls itself the Opium Agency, a new state body, if you like.

27:45What are they doing? Talk about the scale of business and what is going on under the aegis of that letterhead. It's massive, is the first thing to say. It is, and it's a bit like sort of homeland security in the United States. You know how the homeland security starts off as something after 9-11, which has its own sort of spirit. And when you come across homeland security at an American airport, they're much rougher and ruder than the normal officials. And that's true. Can I just say, that's another cavity search in your future. When you come here and when you go there, okay, just wear clean pants at all times.

28:23Carry on. Thank you very much. That's all right. Thank you very much indeed for that little intervention. But the Opium Agency is its own department and has its own recruitment and people enter it for life. You go into the Opium Agency. It's a way of making a lot of money, but it's also, as with everything connected with narcotics throughout history, it's violent and rough. And the Opium Agency now has complete control of all opium dealing in India. All opium is supposed to be for the state and all sales are done through the state. And a whole business network gets set up whereby this agency of the government runs its own show.

29:09It has powers to enforce itself. So it can make threats. It harasses people who don't want to be involved in this. You know, they always want to grow goods or grain or whatever else they want to grow. They're told they can't, they have to grow opium. And it has a reputation for physical violence. So this business expands as their powers grow. They can break down doors, they can search houses, they can arrest people. And while it starts off as being about a million people in what we today would call Bihar, it spreads right through to Western UP, to virtually the vicinity of Agra. So not in Afghanistan yet.