From its rise in the 1830s to its pinnacle in the 1930s, the opium
trade was a guiding force in the Chinese political economy. Opium
money was inextricably bound up in local, national, and imperial
finances, and the people who piloted the trade were integral to the
fabric of Chinese society. In this book, Peter Thilly narrates the
dangerous lives and shrewd business operations of opium traffickers
in southeast China, situating them within a global history of
capitalism. By tracing the evolution of the opium trade from
clandestine offshore agreements in the 1830s, to multi-million
dollar prohibition bureau contracts in the 1930s, Thilly
demonstrates how the modernizing Chinese state was infiltrated,
manipulated, and profoundly transformed by opium profiteers. Opium
merchants carried the drug by sea, over mountains, and up rivers,
with leading traders establishing monopolies over trade routes and
territories and assembling "opium armies" to protect their
businesses. Over time, and as their ranks grew, these organizations
became more bureaucratized and militarized, mimicking-and then
eventually influencing, infiltrating, or supplanting-the state.
Through the chaos of revolution, warlordism, and foreign invasion,
opium traders diligently expanded their power through corruption,
bribery, and direct collaboration with the state. Drug traders
mattered-not only in the seedy ways in which they have been
caricatured but also crucially as shadowy architects of statecraft
and China's evolution on the world stage.
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