Representations of Western Opium Consumption in China: Informal Empire, Medicine and Modernity, 1840–1930

Opium was of central importance to the expansion of western informal empire in China, and became a cipher for contested questions of moral authority, racial hierarchy, scientific knowledge, civilisation and modernity. Westerners involved in the opium trade were imbued with an ethos of ‘distancing’ from Chinese culture and lifestyles, including the smoking of opium, and it has been assumed that westerners largely adhered to these boundaries. However, a small minority of westerners did smoke opium in China, notably medical professionals and other elites. The nature of, and response to, these transgressions is highly revealing of the era’s shifting conceptions of racial hierarchy, medical science, religious morality and ultimately the advent of modernity.