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Poppy in the era of prohibition: Smuggling and state complicity in Upper Burma, c. 1890–1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2025

Jagjeet Lally Open the ORCID record for Jagjeet Lally [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

This article looks at the opium economy and the opium regime in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Burma, focusing particularly on the Burma–China and Burma–Siam borderlands. It explores British responses to complaints from China, as well as Siam, regarding the smuggling of opium from Burma in the very decades — the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s — when the world was moving towards regulation and prohibition. It explains how and why the British Burma government failed to curb both the cultivation of poppy in Burma's uplands and the smuggling of opium to/from neighbouring China and Siam. The colonial government frequently sought to explain away why so little had been achieved and why opium continued to find its way across the border (e.g., from Kengtung state to Siam). Rather than taking these facts at face value, this article reveals the potent relationship between borderlands, smuggling, and state-making, while linking this finding to ideas about Zomia and establishing what was distinctive about the Burma–China–Siam borderland compared with others in the British Empire in Asia.

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Research Article
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Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 3-4 , October 2024 , pp. 393 - 414
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The National University of Singapore

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References

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8 Ibid., pp. 97–100 and 119, where it is acknowledged that regulation perhaps produced greater crime. Saha, Jonathan, ‘Colonization, criminalization and complicity: Policing gambling in Burma c 1880–1920’, South East Asia Research 21, 4 (2013): 655–7210.5367/sear.2013.0174CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 655, for details relating to crime rates in Burma/British India.

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18 Carrapiett, Kachin tribes, pp. 83–4. In all this, therefore, we see a transposition of powerful racial ideas formed on the Indo-Afghan frontier (e.g., regarding noble savages and the martial or Aryan races) to Upper Burma; see Lally, Jagjeet, ‘Landscape, race, and power on the Indo-Afghan frontier, c.1840–c.1880’, South Asian History and Culture 11, 3 (2020): 277–9910.1080/19472498.2020.1797358CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 280 and fn. 24–27. See also Garbagni, Guilia, ‘“The friends of the Burma hill people”: Lieutenant Colonel John Cromarty Tulloch and the British support to the Karen Independence Movement, 1947–1952’, Journal of Burma Studies 21, 2 (2017): 26710.1353/jbs.2017.0009CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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22 R.T. O'Connor Mitchell, Report on a tour in the Naga Hills District (Rangoon: Government Printing, 1940), p. 5. On the Kachin's purchase of large quantities of opium in wholesale markets for use as currency to pay labourers, see Carrapiett, Kachin tribes, p. 20.

23 O'Connor Mitchell, Report, p. 5; Davies, H.R., Yün-nan (Cambridge: University Press, 1909)Google Scholar, p. 311; Myint-U, Modern Burma, pp. 147–8.

24 John Anderson, Mandalay to Momien (London: Macmillan and Co., 1876), p. 300.

25 Macquoid, Report, p. 9, for citations, and p. 48, for details of cultivation and the harvest.

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27 NAM-CSO-PD/1895/1C-7/3374, especially pp. 42–50.

28 Ibid., pp. 50, 57.

29 The Chinese government was still trying to explain this predicament to their counterparts in Burma over 30 years later; see: NAM-DSO-PD/1941/31/D(P)4/6242, p. 4.

30 NAM-CSO-PD/1907/1C-16/Part I/6424, p. 5.

31 This intelligence was received from Burma frontier officers through the local networks but also from despatches from British diplomats in the Chinese provinces and in Peking, supplemented by reports from missionaries (especially those of the China Inland Mission) who were much more dispersed through the borderland than officers of the Burma government.

32 NAM-CSO-PD/1917/1C-1/Part I/7405, p. 3.

33 NAM-CSO-PD/1917/1C-1/Part III/7407, p. 9.

34 NAM-CSO-PD/1907/1C-16/Part III/6426, p. 7.

35 NAM-CSO-PD/1913/1C-17/Part II/7013, p. 6.

36 NAM-CSO-PD/1920/1C-30/Part II/7529; NAM-CSO-PD/1915/1C-27/Part V/7190. The crux of the issue was whether British subjects holding rights under the Transfrontier Cultivation Regulations cultivated land on the Chinese side of the border, which the Chinese suspected: NAM-CSO-PD/1915/1C-27/Part IV/7189, p. 5.

37 Andrew Walker, ‘Seditious state-making in the Mekong borderlands: The Shan rebellion of 1902–1904’, Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 29, 3 (2014): 554–90, and especially the wider references on p. 555.

38 NAM-CSO-PD/1913/1C-1/Part I/7012, p. 3; NAM-CSO-PD/1914/1C-1/Part I/7093, pp. 4–5.

39 NAM-CSO-PD/1913/1C-17/Part I/7012, p. 3; NAM-CSO-PD/1913/1C-17/Part II/7013, p. 6; NAM-CSO-PD/1913/1C-17/Part III/7014, p. 4; NAM-CSO-PD/1913/1C-17/Part IV/7015, p. 4.

40 NAM-CSO-PD/1916/1C-8/Part III/7289, pp. 4 and 7.

41 NAM-CSO-PD/1913/1C-6/3890, pp. 6–7.

42 Ibid., p. 7.

43 On this subject, see Lally, Jagjeet, ‘Salt, smuggling, and sovereignty: Making the Burma-China borderland, c. 1880–1935’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 49, 6 (2021): 1047–810.1080/03086534.2021.1985216CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 See, for example: NAM-CSO-PD/1910/1C-34/6781, pp. 2–3.

45 Ibid., p. 7.

46 Ibid.

47 NAM-CSO-PD/1910/1C-34/6781, p. 7.

48 NAM-CSO-PD/1921/14C-1/Part I/7577, p. 3.

49 NAM-CSO-PD/1910/1C-38/Part III/6785, p. 2

50 The colonial frontier has lately been conceived as a space characterised by ambiguity and freedom that gave officials great latitude for autonomy and creativity; see for example, Thomas Simpson, The frontier in British India: Space, science, and power in the nineteenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

51 NAM-CSO-PD/1910/1C-18/6763, p. 2.

52 Ibid., pp. 4–5.

53 A concise outline of the details abstracted here can be found in Gregory Blue, ‘Opium for China: The British connection’, in Opium regimes, ed. Brook and Wakabayashi, pp. 40–45.

54 Brook and Wakabayashi, ‘Introduction’, p. 13.

55 Wright, Opium and empire, p. 106.

56 Maule, ‘Opium question’, pp. 19–20.

57 For details of revenues, see Wright, Opium and empire, p. 131.

58 NAM-DSO-PD/1938/316D(P)/5860; Wright, Opium and empire, pp. 134–5.

59 For details of how opium was produced in the uplands, see NAM-CSO-PD/1878/14.1/8492, pp. 2–3; O'Connor Mitchell, Report, p. 5; Anderson, Mandalay to Momien, p. 135.

60 NAM-DSO-PD/1939/303D(P)/6072, p. 2.

61 Wright, Opium and empire, pp. 131, 133–4.

62 NAM-CSO-PD/1916/1C-8/Part V/7291, p. 3.

63 Ibid., p. 3.

64 NAM-CSO-PD/1918/1C-12/7469, p. 3.

65 Ibid., p. 4.

66 Maule, ‘Opium question’, p. 15.

67 Ibid., p. 15.

68 Maule, ‘British policy discussions’, p. 204. On the memory of anti-colonial violence around the time of conquest and its impact on colonial policy, see Condos, Mark, The insecurity state: Punjab and the making of colonial power in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)10.1017/9781108289740CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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70 Ibid., pp. 112, 116

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72 J. George Scott and J.P. Hardiman, Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States: Part II, Vol. I (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1901), p. 414.

73 NAM-CSO-PD/1926/114 B/4632.

74 NAM-CSO-PD/1906/4S-19/6406.

75 NAM-CSO-PD/1918/1C-12/7469, p. 7.

76 NAM-CSO-PD/1906/4S-19/6406.

77 NAM-DSO-PD/1939/303D(P)/6072, p. 3.

78 Ibid., pp. 6–7.

79 NAM-CSO-PD/1922/630 B-22/4518, especially pp. 2, 4 and 8.

80 Ibid., p. 11.

81 On the variegated topography of power and its underlying causes, see Lally, ‘Salt and sovereignty’.

82 NAM-CSO-PD/1911/1C-15/Part II/6899.

83 Meehan, ‘Drugs, insurgency and state-building in Burma’, p. 384.

84 NAM-CSO-PD/1920/4S-49/4325, p. 5.

85 Ibid., p. 11.

86 NAM-CSO-PD/1929/376 B-29/4857, pp. 10–11.

87 NAM-CSO-PD/1931/271 B-31/4938, p. 5.

88 Ibid., pp. 4, 10.

89 Ibid., p. 4.

90 Maule, ‘Opium question’, p. 30, for citation, and pp. 28–30 for details.

91 Ibid., p. 30.

92 Ibid., pp. 33–4.

93 Ibid., p. 33.

94 Wright, Opium and empire, p. 132.

95 NAM-DSO-PD/1938/316 D(P)/5860, p. 9.

96 Ibid.

97 Maule, ‘British policy discussions’, pp. 206–10, where it is shown that the matter of exclusions was given serious thought, for otherwise Britain would look ‘insincere’ on the world's stage.

98 Ibid., 210; Maule, ‘Opium question’, p. 36.

99 NAM-DSO-PD/1939/303D(P)/6072, pp. 13–14.

100 Maule, ‘British Policy Questions’, pp. 210–4.

101 See also Nguyễn, Thủy Linh, ‘Dynamite, opium, and a transnational shadow economy at Tonkinese coal mines’, Modern Asian Studies 54, 6 (2020): 1876–90410.1017/S0026749X18000574CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here especially pp. 1897 and 1900–2; Kim, Empires of vice, p. 155, for the squeamishness about using ‘corruption’ for the case surveyed, and pp. 154–81, for analysis.

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105 Here, see also Lally, ‘Salt, smuggling, and sovereignty’.

106 Lally, ‘Landscape, race, and power’, especially pp. 284–91 and fn. 7.