Vermeer's Hat (19 page)
Authors: Timothy Brook
Macao-to-Guangdong and Manila-to-Fujian were the two first itineraries, but tobacco took a third route into China—a route
that was effectively an extension of the first, but more complicated than either. Starting in Macao, it involved four steps.
The first step was from Macao to the southernmost Japanese port of Nagasaki. Portuguese merchants sailing from Macao brought
tobacco with them, and the Japanese were thrilled. Richard Cocks, who ran a short-lived English trading post there, was amazed
at the new rage for tobacco. “It is strange,” Cocks observes in his diary, “to see how these Japons, men, women, and children,
are besotted in drinking that herb; and, not ten years since it was in use first.” In his entry for 7 August 1615, he records
that the local lord banned tobacco smoking and ordered all tobacco plants uprooted, to absolutely no effect. Tobacco had transferred
effortlessly to Japanese culture. No official ban could stop it.
Cocks’s comment that it was “not ten years since it was in use first” allows us to date the arrival of tobacco in Japan to
about 1605. Once in Japan, tobacco took a second step, to Korea. The transfer was immediate, to judge from the comment of
a Dutchman who was shipwrecked there in 1653. When he was surprised to see the locals smoking, his hosts told him that they
had been smoking
nampankoy
or “the
namban
plant” (
namban
, “southern barbarian,” was what the Japanese called the Portuguese) already for half a century. The third step was from
Korea to Manchuria. The Manchus rapidly became keen smokers, so much so that a French missionary in the nineteenth century
assumed that smoking was one of the “usages” that the Manchus imposed on the Chinese. Hongtaiji, the khan who ruled the Manchus
in the decades before their conquest of China, was not so happy that this usage had rooted itself among his men. When in 1635
he discovered that his soldiers were selling their weapons to buy tobacco, he imposed a smoking ban.
Hongtaiji was not alone among rulers around the world who were concerned about the economic effects of smoking, nor was he
uniquely ineffective. Two years earlier Sultan Murad IV outlawed the production, sale, and consumption of tobacco (as well
as coffee) throughout the Ottoman Empire, stiffening earlier prohibitions by making these misdemeanors capital crimes—though
this had no effect on his soldiers. A year before that, Christian IV of Denmark banned tobacco from being taken into Norway
on the conviction that it was harmful to those of his subjects who lived there; eleven years later, Christian rescinded the
ban as unenforceable. Hongtaiji had already done the same thing two years before that. Murad never rescinded his order, though
his death in 1640 meant that the prohibition became defunct even before it was officially lifted in Norway and Manchuria.
The final step on this third route was from Manchuria into northeast China, especially Beijing. There tobacco was known as
the “southern herb,” though its arrival across the northeast border led some Chinese to suppose that tobacco was native to
Korea. By 1637, the two types of tobacco fetching the best prices in Beijing were Fujianese and Manchurian. This is where
Yang Shicong picks up the thread—and the association with sand grouse that leads him to suspect that smoking has to do with
the Manchu threat on the border. The third route is thus a chain of links that no one could have predicted: the world empire
of the Portuguese stretching from Brazil through Goa in India and up to Japan; the regional trading network of the Japanese
into Korea; the circuit of exchange within the Korean peninsula that circulated goods up to Manchuria; and the cross-border
trade between Manchuria and China that enabled the Manchus, thanks to their hugely profitable business in this and other commodities
such as gold and ginseng, to finance their eventual conquest of China in 1644.
WE HAVE OBSERVED THAT sixteenth-century Europeans felt obliged to come up with ways of making sense of tobacco. Seventeenth-century
writers in China worked at the same problem of understanding something so foreign and new.
Take Yao Lü, an obscure writer whose
Dew Book
is now extremely rare. In the front half of his book, Yao jots down his views on ancient matters; in the back, he muses on
modern things, and that is where we find his thoughts on
danbagu
. Yao assumes his reader is ignorant of what smoking entails, so he explains that “you use fire to burn a bowlful, then bring
the pipe to your mouth. The smoke goes through the stem and down your throat.” The effect of inhaling the smoke he analogizes
to drunkenness, referring to
danbagu
’s alternate name, “golden-shred inebriant.” He gives Luzon as tobacco’s place of origin and the Zhangzhou port of Moon Harbor
as its point of entry. Indeed, he notes that the farmers of Zhangzhou adapted it so well that “now there is more here than
in Luzon, so they ship it to that country to sell it.” Serious smokers, however, felt that domestic tobacco was no match for
Luzon tobacco—just as Filipinos regarded their tobacco as inferior to American, and as the English regarded their homegrown
weed as weaker than Virginian. Within China, Fujian tobacco was considered the best. “People in the Yangzi Valley and the
Hunan interior are planting it,” another Chinese writer reports, “but theirs lacks the yellow hue and fineness of leaf of
the tobacco grown in Fujian.” Still, even this second-rate tobacco found a market.
Not all Chinese intellectuals were at ease with the idea that something so wonderful could be entirely foreign in origin.
Some preferred to think that it had been in China all along, so they scanned the voluminous records of the past—the culture’s
repository of good sense—in the hope of discovering that tobacco was safely Chinese after all. The poet-painter Wu Weiye,
for instance, could not rest easy with the common view that “the smoke plant was not heard of in ancient times.” He eventually
found a phrase in the official history of the Tang dynasty about “holy fire” and offered this reference as proof that Chinese
were already smoking in the ninth century. Taking up smoking in the seventeenth century was simply reviving a precedent. This
wasn’t true, of course, but it was Wu’s way of trying to come to terms with tobacco’s foreign origin—trying, in effect, to
negate the reality of transculturation by believing that the practice of smoking was already thoroughly and safely Chinese.
The more effective way of finding a legitimate cultural niche in China for tobacco was to argue, as many did early on, that
tobacco could have a place in Chinese medicine. It was a herb capable of producing powerful effects within the body, after
all, so why not graft it onto the existing system of medical botany? Yao Lü, for instance, believed that tobacco “can block
malarial vapours.” He also reported that pounding its leaves into a paste and rubbing that into the scalp got rid of head
lice. Fang Yizhi accepted that tobacco had pharmacopoeic properties, though he worried that its drying capacity was too fierce
for safe use. “It can be used to dispel dampness,” he allows, “but long usage heats up the lungs. Other medicines mostly
have no effect. Those afflicted with tobacco poisoning will suddenly vomit a yellowish liquid and die.”
The best early medical assessment of tobacco comes from the influential Hangzhou physician and medical writer of the early
seventeenth century, Zhang Jiebin. Zhang was puzzled as to how to classify this new plant. He decided, mistakenly, to put
tobacco in his pharmacopoeia alongside plants that grow in marshy conditions, but it was a late addition. Zhang numbers the
entries in his book, and the entry for tobacco appears between entries “77” and “78” under a heading that we might translate
as “77+.” Zhang starts the entry by describing tobacco’s taste and properties. Then he outlines what ailments it can treat
and under what conditions it should be avoided. He cross-references it to his entry on betel nut. There he notes that both
plants inspire habitual use, especially among southerners, but that betel nut is milder and better suited for treating digestive
ailments.
Zhang admits to having tried tobacco, as a good experimental scientist should. He did not become an enthusiast, however. He
judged the taste acrid and the sensation that a few puffs produced, which he describes as a type of intoxication, not pleasurable.
He found that the effect took a long time to wear off. For those who want to get rid of the sensation, Zhang advises taking
cold water or refined sugar. These are strong yin substances that can counteract the near-pure yang of tobacco. In mild doses,
Zhang allows that tobacco’s yang can help the body to dispel phlegm, remove congestion, warm the internal organs, and speed
circulation. Too much of the drug, however, will do more harm than good—though in that, tobacco was no different from any
other medicinal plant.
Tobacco eventually shed the fanciful pharmacological and botanical explanations attached to it, and dire predictions about
vomiting yellowish liquid dropped from sight. Especially after the ban became a dead letter, everyone in China started smoking.
Dong Han, a Shanghai essayist writing late in the seventeenth century, wonders how this came about. Dong starts by noting
that, outside Fujian Province, only 1 or 2 percent of people took up smoking before the 1640s. Thereafter, however, smoking
spread throughout the Yangtze Delta, taking hold in the cities and then spreading into the villages, first among men and then
with women. In his own time it had become standard etiquette when guests arrived to offer them a smoke. Dong has no answer
as to why this happened, nor whether he became a smoker too. He can only shrug and say, “There’s really no knowing why it
is that people change their customs.”
Other writers make much the same observations about smoking spreading rapidly to all classes, all ages, and both genders.
As one pharmacologist put it, “Among those throughout the realm who enjoy smoking, there is no distinction of high and low,
or of male and female.” Even the very young, especially if they were from Fujian, took up the habit. European visitors to
China in the nineteenth century were amazed to see girls of eight or nine years of age carrying pipes and tobacco in their
pockets and purses. If they were not yet smoking, they were at least adopting the accessories they needed to appear grown
up.
Upper-class women were especially enthusiastic about smoking. We catch a striking glimpse of unusual smoking practices among
elegant women in a curious observation that an eighteenth-century writer records when writing about the customs of the elite
of Suzhou, the busy commercial and cultural hub on the Yangtze Delta. It seems that the grand ladies of Suzhou smoked from
the moment they got up to the moment they went to bed. Given their busy social schedules, the smoking habit put pressure on
how they organized their days, more especially on how they organized their mornings. The writer says that elegant Suzhou women
refused to get up until they had had several pipefuls of tobacco. Since this delayed the arduous but essential task of doing
their hair and makeup before emerging, they ordered their maids to do their coiffures while they were still asleep. That way,
they could afford the time to smoke before getting out of bed. The scene is a little hard to imagine.
Chinese women may have smoked just as fiercely as men, but their bodies were believed to be different. Smoking should have
different effects based on the physiological differences between men and women. Being of the yang gender, men were better
able to withstand the heat of smoking. The yang of their bodies counteracted the yang of the tobacco. Women were of the yin
gender, and their damp constitutions might be damaged by the heating effect of so much yang. They needed to protect themselves
from the natural excess of yang that came with smoking. The issue was not, strictly speaking, only one of gender, for doctors
gave elderly men, whose natural yang was weak, the same advice. For both groups, the yang of tobacco smoke could be reduced
by drawing it through pipes with longer stems. The Chinese pipe was an imitation of the Native American pipe, as were early
pipes in Europe, but the stem of Chinese pipes grew longer and longer, and among women became almost unmanageable. A woman
poet of the eighteenth century, remembered only as Master Lü’s Wife, jokes about the inconvenience of smoking such a pipe
in her dressing room:
This long stick of a tobacco pipe
Is too big to put on my dressing table;
When I lift it, it tears the window paper—
I hook the moonlight and drag it in.
Another way of mitigating the heat of tobacco was to cool the smoke by passing it through that most
yin
of substances, water—hence the appeal of the water pipe, or hookah. Unlike in the Ottoman world, where it was first developed,
the water pipe in China was reserved exclusively for women. In fact, a finely crafted water pipe became the sign of an elegant
female. By the nineteenth century, no woman of style would deign to puff on a plain-stemmed pipe. Pipes were strictly for
men and the lower classes. The same fashion mechanism went into effect when factory-made cigarettes arrived at the beginning
of the twentieth century and pursued their long-drawn-out battle against pipes. A man might take them up, but a woman who
smoked a cigarette was being risqué. By the 1920s, however, a female urban sophisticate would not be caught dead smoking a
pipe. That was for the old hags back in the villages.
Just as women fit tobacco into their lives in ways that suited their habits, so too did men. Gentlemen were particularly concerned
to conform their smoking to the requirements of the socially elegant life. Addicted to tobacco, they wanted it to be seen
as part of what made a gentleman a gentleman and not a commoner. Given that everyone already smoked, it was not immediately
obvious how this should be done. But gradually a set of customs was developed to give smoking the patina of distinctive refinement.
To start with, one had to buy the more expensive brands of tobacco, since price was assumed to discriminate the connoisseur
from the mere consumer. Yet that was not enough of a barrier between elite and common, since anyone with enough money but
no taste could still enter the charmed circle on this basis. There had to be rituals around these activities that distinguished
the elegant gentleman from the rich boor. Gentlemen had to practice their indulgence of tobacco differently from ordinary
people.