This chapter studies the consumption of opium in the Nationalist period, 1911–49. It also looks at the post-Mao era, when modern opium derivatives found their way back to China. China was plunged into turmoil after 1911. For opium, this was a period when what was vital to know was not so much who smoked opium but rather who controlled the trade. According to a survey conducted in 1935 some 3,730,399 people out of a total population of 479,084,651 consumed opium or its modern equivalents. Where late Qing politicians had used opium-generated revenues to keep the empire together, their twentieth-century counterparts used it to partition the country. This was the period of the ‘opium regimes’. Whoever controlled opium, controlled China. ‘Despite much continuity, China from 1800 to 1949 underwent tremendous changes.’ Yet despite the changes, ‘China's cultural differentness strongly persisted even though it was diminishing.’ This can be seen from the social life of opium. What is more, Shanghai vice continued to be Chinese vice right up to the 1990s. Historians of China have studied both its changes and continuity in the twentieth century, but my specific interest here lies in how opium survived and thrived in the midst of quickened disintegration and transition.

‘L'AGE D'OR DE LA BOURGEOISIE CHINOISE’

The Republican era witnessed an increasing sophistication and indigenisation of opium smoking. Alexander des Forges was correct when he put opium in the context of leisure and urban economies of consumption.