If we were to wonder how opium inserted itself in history, the most straightforward answer would probably be: as smoke and through inhalation. In 1878 the late Qing writer Zhang Changjia writes the following paragraphs about opium in his text “Yanhua, ‘Opium Talk’,” published in a Qing ‘collectanea’ in Shanghai:
Apian (阿片) is also written yapian (鴉片). In the Bencao it is called afurong (阿芙蓉). Today it is simply called yan (煙), smoke, or dayan (大煙), the great smoke, or wuyan (烏煙), the black smoke, or else it is called yangyan (洋煙), Western-sea smoke. A look at the character for yan reveals that it is made up of three characters, huo (火)(fire), xi (西)(west), and tu (土)(earth). Clearly when the character was created it already foretold the present day of opium: fire (bringing) earth (from the) west. It is said that at the time of the invention of writing heaven rained millet and demons wept at night. This old saying is quite applicable in the present instance too.
In another passage he writes:
Weapons are evil instruments that sage kings used only when they were forced to. For today’s opium utensils the word “gun” is taken to refer to the smoking shaft, while “bottom of the sea” (haidi – 海底) designates the opening of the mouthpiece, and “gate of struggle” (doumen – 斗門) the opening of the bowl. Such names indicate the formidability of opium. But people become numbed to this fact by habit of frequency and end up applying dangerous instruments directly to their own bodies. That one can be fully conscious and still make such a mistake is thus easier to believe.
When Zhang uses euphemisms such as “gun,” “bottom of the sea” and “gate of struggle,” which refer to the various components of the opium pipe, he is not only speaking of the deeply situated affiliation within the Chinese language between opium smoke and Western warships. The references to the opium wars are clear. However, Zhang remains equivocal in his description of the effects of the opium on the addict’s body. He pictures opium smokers who inhale smoke by passing it from the “gate of struggle” through the “gun,” across the “bottom of the sea” and into their bodies. Every inhalation is yet another passage into the line of fire, a dangerous “mistake” made over and over again. At the same time this very “habit of frequency”, enacted in full consciousness, both numbs smokers and diminishes the dangers of the pipe/gun to the effect that they can apply it “directly to their own bodies.” In other words, through repetition a synthesis is realized that serves to designate a new opium “utensil” reassembled along an unlikely continuum between seemingly disparate parts (from the mouth and the bottom of the sea, to the smoking shaft, the battle ship gun, and from the opening of the bowl where smoke passes to the gate of struggle and finally to the body). We could say that while Zhang is offering a cautionary tale of opium, he is also presenting the smoking pipe as a prosthetic instrument that extends the body of the smoker along a bricolage of semantic and material ‘derivatives’. The question is weather opium smoke was ever fully integrated into the colonial-capitalist machinery? Or in essence there have always been undercurrents of other (even counter) passages of smoke which inspire a different relationship between body, technology and substance?
Measuring Opium, HD video, 2018 (excerpt).
Opium pipe attached to an inhaler with a laser diffraction sensor for measuring the size distribution of opium smoke aerosols.