Representations of Western Opium Consumption in China: Informal Empire, Medicine and Modernity, 1840–1930.

This article examines the complex role of opium consumption among western residents in China’s treaty ports during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, highlighting how opium smoking intersected with informal empire, racial attitudes, and imperial medicine. While opium was central to western commercial and geopolitical interests in China, westerners generally maintained a social taboo against smoking opium themselves, contrasting with widespread Chinese use; however, some western individuals, including medical professionals and officials, did smoke opium, often under the guise of scientific inquiry or personal experimentation. The article explores how racialized medical discourses and moral frameworks justified the opium trade and shaped perceptions of addiction, while also revealing occasional transgressions of social boundaries within colonial society. It further traces the evolving attitudes toward opium amid growing prohibitionist movements, international regulation, and the shifting cultural meanings of opium use in both China and western imperial contexts.