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Frank Dikötter
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Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China Hardcover – April 16, 2004

by Frank Dikötter (Author), Lars Laamann (Author), Zhou Xun (Author)
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 14 ratings
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To this day, the perception persists that China was a civilization defeated by imperialist Britain's most desirable trade commodity, opium—a drug that turned the Chinese into cadaverous addicts in the iron grip of dependence. Britain, in an effort to reverse the damage caused by opium addiction, launched its own version of the "war on drugs," which lasted roughly sixty years, from 1880 to World War II and the beginning of Chinese communism. But, as Narcotic Culture brilliantly shows, the real scandal in Chinese history was not the expansion of the drug trade by Britain in the early nineteenth century, but rather the failure of the British to grasp the consequences of prohibition.

In a stunning historical reversal, Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun tell this different story of the relationship between opium and the Chinese. They reveal that opium actually had few harmful effects on either health or longevity; in fact, it was prepared and appreciated in highly complex rituals with inbuilt constraints preventing excessive use. Opium was even used as a medicinal panacea in China before the availability of aspirin and penicillin. But as a result of the British effort to eradicate opium, the Chinese turned from the relatively benign use of that drug to heroin, morphine, cocaine, and countless other psychoactive substances. Narcotic Culture provides abundant evidence that the transition from a tolerated opium culture to a system of prohibition produced a "cure" that was far worse than the disease.

Delving into a history of drugs and their abuses, Narcotic Culture is part revisionist history of imperial and twentieth-century Britain and part sobering portrait of the dangers of prohibition.
Previous page
  1. Print length
    256 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    University of Chicago Press
  4. Publication date
    April 16, 2004
  5. Dimensions
    8.76 x 5.8 x 0.97 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0226149056
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0226149059
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"[This is an] informative, scholarly and dispassionately fascinating book. . . . Drawing on a wealth of recent research, Narcotic Culture explodes various myths surrounding the use of opium in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. Conventionally, and also according to Communist propaganda, the West (especially the beastly British) willfully debilitated the Chinese empire by turning its denizens into emaciated opium addicts, stripping it of huge quantities of hoarded silver in the process. When the Chinese objected, the British responded with a show of brute imperialist force.

Skillfully deploying historical and medical evidence, Narcotic Culture stands all this on its head. The British and their mercantile allies may actually have done the Chinese a favour. In an age when modern medicines were unavailable, opium became a near-universal, inexpensive panacea against the symptoms of dysentery, cholera, malaria and other endemic diseases. . . . Narcotic Culture teases out the complex relationship between tolerance and suppression. It needs to be read far outside the community of Sinologists whence it has emanated." -- Justin Wintle ― Independent (UK)

About the Author

Frank Dikötter is professor of modern history in China at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He is the author of several books, most recently Crime, Punishment, and the Prison in China.

Lars Laamann is a research fellow at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Xun Zhou is a research fellow at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press; 1st edition (April 16, 2004)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0226149056
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0226149059
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.76 x 5.8 x 0.97 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 14 ratings

About the author

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Frank Dikötter

Frank Dikötter

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Frank Dikotter is the author of a dozen books that have changed the way we look at the history of modern China, including Mao's Great Famine, winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2011. His work has been translated into twenty languages, including The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957, which was short-listed for the Orwell Prize in 2014, and The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962-1976, the final volume in his trilogy on the Mao era. He is Chair Professor at the University of Hong Kong and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. More information can be found on his website at www.frankdikotter.com

Customer reviews

4 out of 5 stars
4 out of 5
14 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

crsmyr
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent!
Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2019
Verified Purchase
Well researched from primary sources and very informative!

The negative reviews of this book are the typical "If you don't agree with what is politically correct, you are a racist!" type of reviews. It seems like a better approach is to discover what really happened, good and bad.
5 people found this helpful
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tropicalman
3.0 out of 5 stars The opinion and truth that any man or woman might share with the world.
Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2020
Verified Purchase
I have ordered the book and will gladly give my response after reading it.
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Dylan M
5.0 out of 5 stars Very Informative
Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2013
Verified Purchase
I was required to have this book for an elective I was taking, and upon reading this was astounded at some of the information provided. Very informative book with grave detail.
8 people found this helpful
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Alan Li Ka Hung
1.0 out of 5 stars Dikkotter is a nut
Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2023
This nut says opium is good for health. See how Emeritus Professor John Y Wong refuted and exposed the lies of this nut in Chapter 4 of his excellent book "Sun Yat Sen: from the Opium War to the Xin Hai Revolution", 2016, Taipei"; Chinese Version.
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Glenn W. Robinette
5.0 out of 5 stars A revolutionary and revisionist history
Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2008
Professor Frank Dikötter, presently teaching history at the University of Hong Kong, is one of the new breed of historians who have tackled the myths and legends that have grown up around the opening of China to the West. Previously, historians were content to uncritically accept the view that bad foreigners addicted the Chinese to opium in a series of 19th century wars, thus feeding the present-day Chinese sense of grievance toward Westerners. What Dikötter has carefully shown, working almost exclusively from impeccable primary sources, is that the truth is much more complex. At the same time, for example, that China's Dao-Guang emperor was complaining of the horrible effects connected with the importation of opium into his country, the British were calmly and quietly using opium legally in larger quantities per capita than the Chinese.

This work traces the history of opium and narcotic use throughout China over the last 200 years, paying particular attention to the so-called remedies for addiction, most of which contained opium, morphine or heroin, that were peddled at the same time. No intelligent researcher can do without this work on his bookshelf as a permanent reference.
19 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
1.0 out of 5 stars One Star
Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2018
ridiculous and shameless idea from white race aspect of view.
5 people found this helpful
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Lost Johnny
1.0 out of 5 stars racist nonsense
Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2013
Dikkoter's claims are absurd. Imperialism always has its apologists. This is just the 'white mans' burden' in a new guise.
Dikkoter is eager to point out Mao's faults whilst eulogizing destructive Western imperialism. Hong Kong has long suffered from British brainwashing. Hong Kong people barely know their own history. That Dikkoter is able to hold down a job in one of Hong Kong's universities is an example of how thoroughly pro-Western biased scholarship has permeated Hong Kong's education system.

Dikkoter's 'brilliance' lies in the speciousness of his arguments. The Chinese had opium long before the British introduced as a means of emptying China's coffers.

Far from exposing propaganda, Dikotter is an exponent of it.
11 people found this helpful
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Philip Luzzatto
4.0 out of 5 stars Passionnant
Reviewed in France on June 27, 2020
Verified Purchase
A lire sans faute, si le sujet vous intéresse !
Décrit les lieux de productions et de consommations en Europe, moyen-Orient et en Asie.
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