THE SEVEN SORROWS OF YUNNAN - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 66

in thrall to the international drug trade? With Tambora's specific dates in mind, what follows
is a probable scenario.
By the time of the Tambora emergency, the commercialization of agriculture in southwest
China had evolved to the point where self-sufficiency was not the dominant working rationale
of the common Yunnanese farmer. Rather, he found himself forced into the marketplace to
raise money for taxes and buy grain in the off-season. In this light, the state bureaucrats who
habitually railed to the court against the “stupidity” of the peasants for selling their excess
harvest rather than storing it as a wedge against crop failure appear disingenuous indeed.
For the low-acreage farmer subject to this commercial market, and in the teeth of a famine,
opium must have represented an irresistible temptation: the poppy was worth twice as much
per acre of yield than the average grain crop and would grow in inhospitable conditions on
marginal soil. Sown in the fall, the opium flower grew to maturity in March and could be
harvested for its sap in summer. It could thus to some degree be grown in conjunction with,
or as supplement to, conventional food crops. At a critical point in the late 1810s, after years
of the worst famine in their experience, the desperate peasant farmers of Yunnan came to the
collective realization that opium was as good as money and more reliable than food.
Figure 5.4. This British illustration dating from China's humiliating defeat in the first Opium War
(1839-42) puts a benevolent face on opium addiction. The mood in this Chinese “opium den” seems re-
creational, even festive. Not visible in the image is an acknowledgment of Britain's vital trade interest in
expanding its market of Chinese drug users or the devastating long-term effects of mass opium consump-
tion on Chinese society. (Thomas Allom, China in a Series of Views Displaying the Scenery, Architecture, and
Social Habits of That Ancient Empire [London, 1843-47], 3:54).
Whatever the advisability of large-scale conversion of land to opium production from the
empire's point of view, for the individual freehold farmer of Yunnan, food security was best
served by significant investment in opium as a security against grain shortfalls and the recur-
rence of famine. Just as important, growth in poppy production served the interests of un-
salaried local officials themselves, who were under pressure to meet tax revenue both to pay
their own wages and to remit quotas to the court. The empire's long-successful system of pro-
vincial revenue extraction failed to adapt to the drastic climate change episode of 1815-18
after which the lure of opium as a cash crop was overwhelming. Once the opium land conver-
sion had occurred, officials had no incentive to enforce anticultivation measures when they
could tax the lucrative crop instead. In 1820s Yunnan, the foxes took guard of the opium hen-
house.
In short, faced with multiyear food shortages in the Tambora years of 1815-18, Yunnan's
farmers found they could neither grow rice nor buy it when they most needed it. Circumstan-
tial evidence suggests that they subsequently settled on an opium solution to their chronic