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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, from HowStuffWorks.com.

Katie

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I’m Katie Lambert.

Sara: And I’m Sara Dowdy. And as most of you know, Katie and I love Victorian Literature and 19th Century British novels and poetry. And we were talking about it recently, the character of the Opium Addict or the Opium eater -

Katie

There’s so many of them.

Sara: Pops up a lot, doesn’t he?

Katie

And for awhile, I thought that was just sort of the easy thing to go to. Like, I need an extra character, who should I put in? I know, the Opium eater. But then I realized it was an actual problem in British society at the time.

Sara: It was a major problem in Victorian England. There were a lot of opium addicts. But it turns out that is nothing compared to the problem the Victorians forced on the Chinese at the same time.

Katie

So let’s talk about opium history, and how it got to China and Britain in the first place. Opium is great for relieving tension and pain, not that we’re recommending this, because we’re absolutely not, but that’s why it became popular. The ancient Assyrians used it as a pain killer. So did first century Greeks. And there don’t seem to be any addictions in those old stories, and that may be because of how they were taking it, which was in pills or added to drinks. Turkish and Arab traders brought opium to China in the sixth or seventh century, but the 17th century marks when we learned how to smoke it. Helpful westerners had seen Indians smoking tobacco in pipes, and thought, “Hey, why don’t we add a little opium to the tobacco?” Realized it was fantastic for what they were looking for, and quickly got addicted and brought it over to China. And the Portuguese started making a killing bringing Opium from India to China. IN the 1700s, the west is using opium, laudanum, and paregoric in those wonderful quackery kind of patent medicines. And in 1729, it’s a huge problem in China, and the emperor at the time outlaws the sale and the smoking of opium, but it doesn’t end. And we’re going to talk a little bit about why and how it got there, which would be thanks to the British.

Sara: So the British have a very unequal trade relationship with the Chinese, and part of this has to do with the Manchu emperors believing the middle kingdom already had everything it needed, they don’t need to import stuff from the British. But that’s a pretty valid belief in a way. On the one hand you have the British who are obsessed with tea – they can’t get enough tea from China – and Columbia University actually estimates that the average Londoner spent five percent of the total household budget on tea.