The province does not grow food planting big tobacco: Anhui had been the opium trade, how bad?

Originally titled: The province planted opium together, how miserable was Anhui? Wasting money, destroying the body and mind, and blurring consciousness, opium is the most popular imported commodity even though it is a sin that has flowed in from foreign countries since the opening of the ports of modern China. Opium addicts smoking opium ***, always make people lose themselves, and even guide the layout of agriculture. A Qing Dynasty opium house where people spent their days gulping down opium (Photo from Wikipedia@Juan Mencarini Pierotti)▼ One of the witnesses to the scourge of opium in China in modern times has been Anhui. The poppy rush to Anhui Anhui was a major grain-producing province, and although the diversion of the Yellow River at the end of the Qing dynasty affected production in northern Anhui, the province's rice cultivation was still able to be exported to food-deficit areas downstream of the Yangtze River. At that time, Anhui rice houses could be found in Shanghai, Suzhou, and Ningbo, which made Wuhu, a good Yangtze River port, one of the four major rice markets in China, and known in the port community as the ""Giant Ports of the Yangtze River"", along with Jiujiang in the upper reaches and Zhenjiang in the lower reaches. On the Grand Canal - the golden waterway of the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River in the Qing Dynasty, each province could give birth to one or two major towns of industry▼ In terms of cash crops, the mainstay was tea seeds and tea leaves from the mountains of southern Anhui, raw silk, and medicinal herbs - traditional local specialties in Anhui that were popular in the markets of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. But the wonderful small peasant economy soon collapsed completely with the arrival of opium. Of course, smallness and beauty in the agricultural era did not depend solely on agriculture, and with tensions over land and people, it was cash crops and sub-contracted handicrafts that were the source of profit (and opium was an extremely deadly "cash crop" at the time) (Photo @TuWuCreative)▼ Opium didn't appear on a large scale in Anhui for very long, with the British bringing it over from India. Opium first landed in Anhui after the opening of Wuhu under the Treaty of Yantai. But once in Anhui, the addictive drug quickly became popular with locals, and imports rose rapidly in both volume and value. In contrast to the many unequal treaties that preceded it, the ports Britain wanted to penetrate in the Treaty of Yantai were no longer seaports, but basically inland ports in the Yangtze River Basin. Britain had already hoped to gradually consider the Yangtze River Basin its own sphere of influence (the map shows not only ports of commerce, but also some of the ports that could be called on in the treaty)▼ According to Fang Qianyi of the Anhui University of Engineering, since the opening of the ports in 1877, the value of opium imports has been in the region of Since the opening of the port in 1877, opium imports have accounted for more than 50 percent of the total value of imported goods, and even more than 70 percent in individual years. Even after 1888, when the share of imported opium declined, it still remained Wuhu's top imported commodity for a long time, accounting for 1/17th of the country's annual opium imports. India's coffers are still full of opium, waiting to be digested by the Chinese (photo from ***) ▼ For the British, this strange inland land mass in Anhui was the best dumping ground for opium, helping them to make a bigger surplus in their trade with China. For the British, this strange inland land in Anhui was the best place to dump opium, helping them to make a bigger surplus in trade with China. They used the opium they harvested in large quantities in India to buy value-added cotton and linen fabrics, medicinal herbs and tea in Anhui. And with Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, black tea production rose, they quickly abandoned the Anhui import market, forcing tea farmers had to cut down the tea trees, Anhui tea industry has been in ruins. Tea was one of China's few remaining export strengths, yet with their vast colonies and strong organisational skills, it was only a matter of time before the West brought down China's myriad of scattered tea farmers and tea merchants (Tea plantation on Java) (Image via Wikimedia Commons)▼ Although the people of Anhui were also aware of the dangers of opium, at the time, they were not thinking about anti-drugs, but how to make money from it. but rather how to profit from it. Between the high price of imported opium and the near-absence of supply in the local opium market, a business opportunity was born. Farmers in Anhui began to abandon food production in favor of poppy as their main cash crop. At a time when a country has lost its ability to organise itself and is being infiltrated from abroad, this extremely limited resource means that just to survive is to the detriment of others (image via shutterstock)▼ In 1879, Anhui had no poppy production capacity of its own, and just eight years later, in 1887, it was not only producing enough for its own use, but also exporting poppy to Shanghai. 1887 was the year that 1887, exactly 1888, opium imports in Wuhu in the proportion of the decline in the previous year, it can be seen that the oversupply of soil tobacco really squeezed the market space of foreign cigarettes. Drug use, once popularized, even tends to become "refined" (the poor and the rich have their own "refinements") (image via shutterstock)▼ But unlike other national products, which have declared war on the pride that comes with foreign goods, this battle of opium has instead led to the destruction of the market for opium. But unlike the pride that comes from declaring war on foreign goods, this battle over opium is a sad one. As opium became an industry, growing local produce became a thankless business, and poppies became a means of making a profit. By the 1920s, opium had spread throughout the north and south of Anhui, with the greatest amount on the Jianghuai Plain in northern Anhui, and quite a bit in the mountainous areas of southern Anhui. In the more restrained Quanjiao County, "a variety of opium everywhere, Miwang are poppies ...... small families are planted one or two acres of two or three acres ranging, salty that more profit than the harvest", and in Suzhou, Eddy Yang, Bozhou, Fuyang has been all over the place. This seriously crowded the space of other agricultural products. It's a lot more profitable than hard work growing grain, but the result of this widespread practice is a society that tends to collapse, in which almost everyone loses (image via shutterstock)▼ According to a survey by Zheng Jinbiao and others at Anhui University of Finance and Economics, in 1906 the International Opium Commission put the province's opium production at 6,000 quintals. One quintal equals one hundred pounds, and with an average output of just 3 pounds of opium per acre, 2 million acres of arable land would be needed to produce that kind of output. In the middle and late Qing Dynasty, Anhui's arable land area was only 40 million mu, of which 5% was planted with opium, which was originally all fertile land to be used for growing grain, reducing Anhui's food security against famine. China's opium imports, already growing extremely rapidly before 1840, could no longer be curbed after losing the war.▼ This is only a rough estimate given by the International Opium Commission. The even bigger-caliber Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs puts opium production at 40,000 to 50,000 quintals in Fengyang, Fuyang and Huizhou alone, with the province's output even more impressive. And this will occupy more than 1/4 of the province's arable land, Anhui from a grain-producing province into a precarious food province. This also led directly to the decline of the Wuhu rice market, so that Anhui in the Yangtze River golden harbor sequence disappeared. Northern Anhui was really the hardest-hit area▼ And in areas where the production of tobacco soil was the main industry, agricultural tools used for rice cultivation were put away and not used, and a generation later there was even the absurdity of farmers not being able to harness their oxen or plough their fields. (Image via shutterstock)▼ Naturally, it was also the local people of Anhui who consumed the tobacco. With no tariffs and easy transportation, they were half the price of imported cigarettes. Anhui addicts who were financially trapped by foreign cigarettes soon switched to local cigarettes. But regardless of foreign soil, as long as the opium is addictive and harmful, many farmers caught the addiction, all day long at home to swallow clouds, unwilling to work on the ground, exacerbating the food crisis in Anhui. Collectively "going to heaven", in a trance (Image from: *** Illustration)▼ This was not really a problem in Anhui, where poppy cultivation was a craze across the country in order to compete with foreign cigarettes in the market. The notorious ones were Sichuan and Yunnan, where Sichuan and Yunnan clays were the most popular tobacco clays on the Chinese market in the late Qing and early Republic. In neighboring Jiangsu, poppy cultivation was also prevalent, and Xuzhou became the city that exported the most clay tobacco to Anhui. The promised Chinese not to harm the Chinese ended up being a national tragedy due to the *** naked pursuit of commercial interests. The ban on smoking is all business In view of the poisonous effects of opium on the people of Anhui Province, the Qing Dynasty *** has repeatedly ordered the complete eradication of poppies. 1906, the Qing Dynasty *** issued a "ban on smoking statute of ten articles", directly referring to the "Jianghuai and other places, all for the production of soil in the most flourishing area", requiring local officials to select the appropriate food according to the local soil nature of the replanting. 1908, again, issued a "ban on smoking to reduce seed regulations". In 1908, the government issued the "Regulations on the Prohibition of Tobacco and Reduction of Planting", which required local officials to "never allow planting again". By this time, more than 60 years had passed since Lin Zexu's ban on smoking, and only six years remained until the end of the Qing Dynasty (Lin Zexu's report to the Daoguang Emperor of the Qing Dynasty on opium seizures) (Photo: Wikimedia)▼ There were countless orders from the central government, but the actions of the local officials were dilly-dallying, leaving the emperor alone in a state of impatience. For example, Li Mingchu, governor of Suzhou, reported to the governor of Anhui, "The poor people are living on tobacco seedlings and must not be culled of poppies," playing tai chi with his superiors. Hefei County is even more powerful, in the city open smokehouse, "the official is due to follow in the upper, the servant haze bribe in the lower", the upper and lower, watertight. The local officials were not indifferent to the anti-smoking order, and the tobacco trade had become a pillar industry in the area. Wuhu Customs, which first brought in opium, gained a large amount of tariffs by importing opium, and the profitable Wuhu *** never showed any hostility to the import of opium. On the contrary, the Wuhu Customs had complained to their superiors when the cultivation of soils in Anhui Province lowered the price of foreign cigarettes and made their own income less. They never considered the physical and mental damage of the tobacco soil to the people, but just wanted to profit more from it. A more subtle reason was that many magistrates themselves had become y involved, some becoming addicts and some becoming owners of tobacco shops. There was an Anhui governor issued "officials anti-smoking charter," requiring subordinates to report their smoking history to their superiors within a specified period of time, but after a few months there were very few reports, it is clear that they are all weak-minded. Physical decadence and psychological despair were also mutually reinforcing. Behind them were 40,000,000 people seeking to survive in a world of uncertainty and chaos (Photo: Wikipedia)▼ As the Qing dynasty changed hands and the situation became more chaotic, the smoking ban became even more difficult. Even after Chiang Kai-shek largely took control and set up the second generation of the Nationalist *** in Nanjing, the smoking ban in Anhui was still struggling. And unlike the Qing Dynasty, when the central government was determined to ban smoking and the local government dragged its feet, the Nanjing central government, which was extremely short of money, did not really want to ban smoking. In 1928, the Nanjing National *** held up the "Premier's legacy of drug refusal" and launched a crackdown on Anhui's tobacco growing industry. But the crackdown was carried out in an unexpected way, claiming that ""banning in donation"" and banning smoking by raising taxes actually shifted the pressure of raising military funds to the farmers. There was even a ridiculous incident in which the Quanjiao anti-smoking office called all county officials and tobacco shareholders to ask for money to be paid and released, and ultimately extracted 20 million yuan of donations and taxes in the province in the name of the ban on smoking, which was equivalent to the total cash reserves of the Central Bank at that time. Opium was to be banned, a new life was to be created, and taxes were not to be spared. For the sake of the last item, everything else could be dealt with flexibly (Photo from: Wikipedia@ThreeHunts)▼ As the central government was so greedy, the local authorities were also uptight, and in 1931, when the Huaihe River flooded, a large amount of good land in northern Anhui was destroyed, and the rural economy was completely bankrupted. But thieving local officials did not think about disaster relief; they raised taxes on tobacco and soil, and cried poverty to the central government, with both ends of the money going into private pockets. When the provincial *** on the county-level financial inventory found that the county chief involved in corruption accounted for half. In fact, the province *** sandwiched in the middle is not a good bird. 1932, in the Nanjing direction of fierce military expenditure requirements, Anhui Province *** came up with a "special goods" idea, prohibited farmers from growing and selling tobacco, in fact, the collected stock sold themselves, but also on the tobacco shops and smokers tax, empty gloves to make money at both ends. So eventually, in Anhui under Nanjing's control, the ban on smoking became a total business. Peasants paid high surtaxes to secretly grow tobacco soil, which *** was responsible for distributing, and downstream, *** never worked to eliminate the demand of addicts, but rather extracted taxes from these poor people through high tax burdens until the oil ran out and it was a mess ...... References: 1. Fang Qianyi. Competition and Substitution of Chinese and Foreign Opium in the Port Market (1877-1912)-Analysis Based on Wuhu Customs Data[J]. Anhui History, 2016 (2016 03): 58-64. 2. Guo Zichu. The Opium Governance in Northern Anhui under Different Subjects in the Early Period of Nanjing National *** (1927-1934)[J]. Journal of Chizhou College, 2018 (2018 02): 84-87. 3. Zheng Jinbiao, Zhang Mei. A discussion on the prohibition of smoking in Anhui at the end of the Qing Dynasty[J]. Journal of Chifeng College (Philosophy and Social Science Edition), 2015, 36(11): 32-33. 4. The opening of Wuhu port and the development of Anhui modern economy[J]. Anhui History, 1995, 3. *The content of this article is provided by the author and does not represent the position of Earth Knowledge Bureau Cover image from shutterstock