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Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China

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Professor Frank Dikötter, presently teaching history at the University of Hong Kong, is one of the new breed of historians who have tackled the myths and legends that have grown up around the opening of China to the West. Previously, historians were content to uncritically accept the view that bad foreigners addicted the Chinese to opium in a series of 19th century wars, thus feeding the present-day Chinese sense of grievance toward Westerners. What Dikötter has carefully shown, working almost exclusively from impeccable primary sources, is that the truth is much more complex. At the same time, for example, that China's Dao-Guang emperor was complaining of the horrible effects connected with the importation of opium into his country, the British were calmly and quietly using opium legally in larger quantities per capita than the Chinese.

This work traces the history of opium and narcotic use throughout China over the last 200 years, paying particular attention to the so-called remedies for addiction, most of which contained opium, morphine or heroin, that were peddled at the same time. No intelligent researcher can do without this work on his bookshelf as a permanent reference.