By the 1920s, Japanese colonialists in Taiwan had set up 700 acres of plantations for growing transplanted Peruvian coca leaves, a crop which enabled Taiwan-based Japanese pharmaceutical companies to manufacture around 800kg of processed cocaine per year. Though some of this went to medical use, as much as 700kg per year went “missing” in the official records.
Very likely, this missing cocaine found its way across the Taiwan Strait to the city of Xiamen in China’s Fujian Province, a drug-trade entrepot run by Taiwanese gangsters. In the years leading up to the jazz age, the port city received 98 percent of China’s cocaine imports –– the drug was legal in China until 1910 –– and through the 1920s and 1930s became a “cocaine trampoline,” or major transshipment point, for the entire Asia region.
This bump of cocaine trivia is part of the fascinating history of the Fujian drug trade as outlined in a new book The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China by Peter Thilly, a history instructor at the University of Mississippi.
Thilly takes a deep dive into the drug history of southern Fujian Province from the early 19th century up to the moment all drug commerce was wiped out in China with the Communist victory of 1949, weaving together a saga of narcotics, politics and commerce that involved colonial traders, warlords, gangsters, politicians and the vast network of Fujianese merchants, who operated the mightiest trade networks in East and South China Seas.
EIGHTEEN ELDER BROTHERS
Though for some reason cocaine never really caught on in China, the drug was becoming popular throughout India, Burma and Malaya, where it was in very early days introduced by mixing it into betel nut paste. Distribution occurred via factory manufactured tins under the Fujitsuru, Buddha and Elephant brand names, which were ubiquitous from Honolulu to Bombay though of mysterious origin. The best evidence suggests these cocaine brands originated from Xiamen.
From the mid-1920s until the end of the Chinese Civil War, the Xiamen vice trade was run by a group of Taiwanese gangster-politicians, who dressed in Western tailored suits and came to be known as the Eighteen Elder Brothers. They came to power by pushing out Fujian’s old opium families and ran at least 90 brothels, 430 opium dens, and various gambling parlors and hotels.
One Taiwanese big brother, Tseng Hou-kun (曾厚坤), in the 1920s managed to install himself as the central dealer for the poppy production of three counties surrounding Xiamen. Poppy farming began by 1830 in China, and though locally produced opium was said to cause headaches, by 1870 domestic production overtook imports.
As a regional “opium king,” Tseng one year paid as much as a million Mexican silver dollars a year to a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) military governor for the rights to collect the region’s poppy tax. He also later came to run Fujian’s Opium Prohibition Bureau, an absolute oxymoron of an agency which did nothing to prohibit opium but rather levied taxes on the retail sale of the drug in opium dens and dispensaries. So for any opium either bought or sold in southern Fujian, Tseng took a cut. He also served 11 terms as president of the city’s Taiwan Guild (台灣工會), undertook major construction contracts from the government, and was eventually appointed president of the Xiamen Finance Association.
Though a Taiwanese citizen, Tseng was in reality born and bred in Fujian. He had become “registered” as Taiwanese by the Japanese consul — Japanese authorities were very loose with their official stamps, registering tens of thousands of Fujianese — and was therefore able to claim the privileges of a citizen of the Japanese empire. Owing to extraterritoriality, “registered Taiwanese” were not subject to Chinese laws. It was a massive loophole that allowed figures like Tseng and the Eighteen Elder Brothers to run Xiamen’s vice industries with impunity to the city’s Chinese police and governors.
Not that the Chinese government offered much in the way of stability. Between 1917 and 1938, the cities and counties of southern Fujian were constantly switching hands between competing warlords, naval commanders and KMT military governors. Yet as each new figure entered into the seat of government, the Taiwanese opium kings were ready to negotiate a deal, offering their services in collecting opium taxes. This tax revenue amounted to several millions of silver dollars per year and was used to fund warlord armies and even the KMT itself. (In the early 1930s, the KMT was estimated to derive around US$100 million in opium revenues throughout all of China.)
DEN OF VICE
The Xiamen of Thilly’s description is an almost Biblical den of vice in which government and opium lords existed in a fluid continuum. Several of the bald-faced contradictions seem almost unreal. In the 1930s, Thilly writes, “the Japanese consul in Xiamen created an independent police force housed within a Taiwanese brothel...staffed with roughnecks from the opium and sex industry” and with “the backing of the Japanese Navy.”
When the Japanese military occupied Xiamen in 1938, he continues, several of the “city’s Taiwanese opium traders” took roles managing the opium trade in the new Japanese government, living a “fever dream of power and profit.”
Yet the 1920s and 1930s was hardly Fujian’s first moment at the center of the Asian drug trade. The history of Fujian’s drug economy dates to the early 1800s, when the British began importing large quantities of Indian opium — Patna and Benares — into China, with Guangdong and Fujian as initial centers for import. Though the Qing government deemed the trade illegal, by the end of the 1830s, the British were importing around 2.4 million kg of opium per year, and 60 percent of this entered via Fujian’s craggy coastline and labyrinthine waterways. There, British holding ships would anchor in inconspicuous bays and leave the actual smuggling to local Chinese boatmen.
ADDICTED TO TAXES
China’s Qing and republican governments were in principle opposed to opium as a social evil. But as a result of the Opium Wars between 1839 and 1860, in which the British defeated Qing forces for the purpose of opening trade, opium achieved a de facto legality in China from 1857 to 1906. Moreover, as systems of opium taxes, both official and extralegal, formed through the 19th century, Thilly observes that even government officials who opposed the drug became addicted to the tax revenue.
In the book’s conclusion, Thilly further suggests that taxing drugs actually incentivized Chinese governments to make drug use more widespread within its population. Nineteenth century Fujian, he contends, offers an early example of a narco-state that may help us understand Mexican and Colombian drug cartels today.
On the whole, The Opium Business is a unique and detailed picture of a drug trade that was incredibly difficult to document. Thilly’s sources are extensive, including commercial correspondence of the Jardine Matheson Company, government documents from Qing, KMT and colonial authorities, and both Chinese and English language newspapers from China. If there is a flaw, it is that despite the excellent scholarship, the text often reads like a work of forensic economics. Sometimes it feels like one is reading through drug runners’ ledger tables.
For readers in Taiwan, the book further offers a fascinating look beyond the currently pervasive “Taiwanology,” by which Taiwanese turn a willfully blind eye to their historical connections to China, despite the fact that most here trace their ancestry back to Fujian. If, for example, you go to any old temple in Taiwan, most of the god effigies come from China. And where in China? Odds are it is one of the cities or towns described in this book.
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