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Apr 3, 7:52am
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History of the Opium Poppy
Use of the opium poppy predates written history. Images of opium poppies have been found in ancient Sumerian artifacts (ca. 4000 BC)(southwest of modern Iran). The opium poppy was also known to the ancient Greeks, from whom it gained its modern name of Opium. In historic contexts from Greece remains have been discovered in proto-geometric contexts at sites such as kalapodi and Kastanas.
Opium was used for treating asthma, stomach illnesses, and bad eye sight. The Opium Wars between China and the British Empire took place in the late 1830s when the Chinese attempted to stop the sale of opium by Britain, in China.
Many modern writers, particularly in the nineteenth century, have written on the opium poppy and its effects, notably L. Frank Baum with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater...
(Working drawing for poppy shade, ca. 1900-15,
Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933)American Tiffany Studios (1902-1938)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Opium-smoker of Romance, China
On March 30th I reached Tak-wan-hsien, the day's stage having been seventy li (twenty-three and one-third miles). I was carried all the way by three chair-coolies in a heavy chair in steady rain that made the unpaved track as slippery as ice--and this over the dizzy heights of a mountain pathway of extraordinary irregularity. Never slipping, never making a mistake, the three coolies bore the chair with my thirteen stone, easily and without straining. From[Pg 94] time to time they rested a minute or two to take a whiff of tobacco; they were always in good humour, and finished the day as strong and fresh as when they began it. Within an hour of their arrival all these three men were lying on their sides in the room opposite to mine, with their opium-pipes and little wooden vials of opium before them, all three engaged in rolling and heating in their opium-lamps treacly pellets of opium. Then they had their daily smoke of opium. "They were ruining themselves body and soul." Two of the men were past middle age; the third was a strapping young fellow of twenty-five. They may have only recently acquired the habit, I had no means of asking them; but those who know Western China will tell you that it is almost certain that the two elder men had used the opium-pipe as a stimulant since they were as young as their companion. All three men were physically well-developed, with large frames, showing unusual muscular strength and endurance, and differed, indeed, from those resurrected corpses whose fleshless figures, drawn by imaginative Chinese artists, we have known for years to be typical of our poor lost brothers--the opium-smoking millions of China. (...)
From Project Gutenberg's An Australian in China, by George Ernest Morrison
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