Carol Benedict, Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010

Abstract

Against a backdrop of ever more stringent anti-smoking legislation in Europe and in North America, China has crystallised as the only major market promising a bright future for the tobacco industry. Yet, as Carol Benedict's new book shows, tobacco clearly also has a long history in China. Golden-Silk Smoke provides for a densely argued narrative, often almost encyclopaedic in nature. Exhaustive and well-illustrated, both through anecdotes and a great variety of sources and pictures, this is certainly a book which would also appeal to a non-specialist public. Going back to the drug's proliferation from the newly-colonised Americas, this monograph spans nearly half a millennium, covered in chronological order in its chapters. A closer look, however, shows that this study is really centred on two periods: Late Ming to mid Qing (1550–1750) and late Qing to the end of the Republic (1880/1900–1949). The relative sparseness (20 pages) of the only chapter devoted to the ‘high’ Qing (1750–1900) seems puzzling. At second glance, however, this is no coincidence. Benedict deals with great passion and professionalism with all aspects of tobacco smoking, such as perceptions towards imported tobacco versus regional produce, but underexposes one important element, namely that this very period saw the proliferation of opium smoking—a phenomenon the author has surprisingly little to say about (bar one—very interesting—reference on p. 79). This is a pity, since tobacco blended with opium became an eighteenth-century hallmark of Chinese smoking culture, at least in the south. In fact, Chinese sources of this period often do not distinguish between straight tobacco and its narcotic counterpart (madak), both being referred to as 煙 yan. The subsequent century would be marked by a national craze for the smoking of a specially prepared opium paste, which would give late imperial China's smoking culture a distinctly new direction. Although strictly speaking beyond the focus of this monograph, the transformation of smoking habits by opium should have been given greater recognition.