| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Zheng Yangwen. The Social Life of Opium in China. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 241. Cloth $70.00, paper $29.99.
Anyone who has even a modest knowledge of China knows the importance of opium in that nation's modern history. Indeed, much has been written on opium and opium-related issues since Hosea Ballou Morse's classic, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire (1910–1918). Yet little has been published on the role of opium smoking in China's social history and on patterns of opium consumption in China. Zheng Yangwen's book helps fill that gap.	1
The book tells the story of opium from the late fifteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Opium as a type of herbal medicine for treating pain, diarrhea, sunstroke, and other ailments has ancient roots in China that can be traced as far back as the seventh century, but it became a recreational drug only after it was introduced as a form of yanghuo (foreign goods) in the late fifteenth century. Zheng clearly delineates how opium was spread along class lines, from the imperial court to grass roots society, and along geographic lines, from coastal areas to the hinterland. In the process, Chinese scholar-officials played a decisive role. They brought opium consumption into sex-as-recreation in the late eighteenth century, spread the gospel of opium at the turn of the nineteenth century, and urbanized it in the decades around the Opium War of 1839–1842. Zheng's account of opium includes a discussion of its proliferation as a crop and as contraband, how it generated a literature that contributed to the spread of vernacular Chinese, and vice versa, and how it performed multifaceted functions—boredom killer, livelihood, and means of protest and protection—in women's lives. Throughout the book, Zheng frequently makes references to or comments on scholarly works in Chinese studies on the various subjects under discussion. The author's command of the literature allows her dialogue with the existing scholarship to integrate seamlessly with the narrative. China specialists will find the book engaging and intellectually stimulating.	. . .

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