April was the beginning of the new growing season, with various ceremonies, such as the dedication of the spirit house near the fields. In May, the fields were planted in anticipation of the rains. Four ceremonies occurred this month, including one to bless the first rice planting, to repair a holy well, a ground-beetle catching ceremony for a rice pest, and finally, a ceremony to apologize to all the insects that were killed during the cultivation.
In June, as the four-month rainy season commenced, there was a ceremony with a sacrifice to the source of the river, the ever-flowing supplier of water. During this month, everything was supposed to be growing strong—trees, animals, even the cricket in its hole developing strong wings. In July, as the rice grew ankle-high, the Akha weeded for the first time, often during heavy rains. They conducted a ceremony for “making a merit in the rice field.”
Near the end of August, the three-day Swing Ceremony commenced, which was a fun-filled way to further ensure a good rice harvest. Women went to the holy well for water to bless the rite and prepared special rice cakes with salt and sesame seeds. A large swing was constructed with four long wooden poles tied together at the top, holding a woven vine strong enough for two Akha to ride on a horizontal stick held at the bottom. Sometimes it would swing out over the edge of a cliff. They also made a smaller swing for children. The Akha sang special songs and recited poems during this time.
In September, there were rituals such as the Plucking Chicken Ceremony and the Evil Driving Out Ceremony. This latter event was a favorite with the boys, who got to run repeatedly through the houses and the village with wooden clubs to chase the evil spirits away.
October, the last month of the rainy season, featured the harvest. Nature was bursting with ripe fruits and the rice was ready, with an appropriate New Rice Eating Ceremony. The harvest continued into November, when the rice was beaten and threshed, then stored in a barn, for which appropriate rituals were performed. This was the time to choose rice seed for the next year’s planting as well. Finally, in December the rice barn was officially opened for use with a Top Hitting Ceremony, and near the month’s end, New Year’s was celebrated.
Thus, the Akha lived in a traditional, well-regulated culture, in tune with the seasons. While they feared and placated the spirits, they also had plenty of human spirit themselves. During the New Year’s ceremony, boys made and spun tops, trying to knock opponents’ toys out of the circle. Girls played a pitch-and-toss game with beans. Children sometimes strode tall on stilts; other times they rode a kind of three-wheeled wooden go-cart, greased with the rind from a fruit, that could go dangerously fast down hills. During some festivals, children climbed up a greased bamboo pole to reach a prize.
In another game, children would set two long bamboo sticks on the ground, slapping them together rhythmically while a boy jumped in and out. They increased the speed until his ankle was caught, and then the boy had to manipulate the bamboo himself. They played variations of tag, tug-of-war, and hide-and-seek.
Those too old to play active games would sometimes have a smoking competition, seeing who could turn their burning tobacco as red as possible, followed by a kind of quiz game, and then more smoking. The one whose pipe lasted longest was declared the winner.
As they worked in the fields or spun cotton in their homes, the Akha sang joyful or plaintive songs to stave off loneliness or just to pass the time. During ceremonies, they would dance in their finely embroidered clothes and headdresses, loaded with silver coins and feathers, accompanied by wood drums, gongs, cymbals, and wooden flutes.
And at night, mothers would sing lullabies to their children, such as this one:
Oh little girl, little girl,
Come to sleep, come to sleep right here.
Oh little girl, Mama is here,
So don’t cry, don’t you cry.
Nobody is scolding you little one,
No one at all.
If you continue to cry,
All the other mothers will call you fussy.
The Akha were appalled when they learned that some ethnic Chinese not only scolded their children but would hit them—not just with their knuckles, but with sticks. The Akha would never tolerate such behavior.
Opium
NO HISTORY OF the Akha would be complete without a history of opium, whose story stretches back thousands of years, and which became an important, illegal cash crop for the Akha. Humans probably discovered the magical properties of the poppy plant before they learned to brew alcohol. Neolithic villagers in Switzerland left behind poppy seeds and pods around 4000 BCE, and the Sumerians were cultivating the lovely paper-thin flowers in the Fertile Crescent of the Tigris-Euphrates rivers by 3400 BCE. Some authorities have opined that Arab traders introduced poppy cultivation and opium to China as late as the sixth century, but it probably arrived much earlier in the Far East. In Opium: A History, Martin Booth wrote:
Opium was either brought home by Chinese seafarers who were sailing as far as Africa in the first century BCE, or introduced by Buddhist priests from Tibet around the first century CE… or, just as likely, it arrived from India via Burma, where Chinese merchants were trading in jade and gemstones as early as the third century BCE, or from Bactria (central Asia) whence the famous Chinese explorer, Chang Chien, traveled in 139 BCE, meeting the remnants of the Greek civilization of Alexander the Great there.
There is no question, however, that the Arabs did spread opium through extensive trade, and the ninth-century physician known as Avicenna advocated opium for the treatment of diarrhea, dysentery, and eye diseases. Avicenna was also an addict, writing poetry in praise of the poppy. He died at fifty-eight, probably from an overdose of opium mixed with wine.
Around 1520, the German-Swiss Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus, combined medicine and alchemy, dispensing pills he called laudanum (from the Latin word for “praise”), with opium its main ingredient. In 1546, a Frenchman visiting Turkey observed: “There is not a Turk who would not purchase opium with his last coin; he carries the drug on him in war and peace.”
Opium’s popularity quickly spread. In 1603, Shakespeare acknowledged it in Othello, referring to “poppy [and] all the drowsy syrups of the world.” In the 1660s, British physician Thomas Sydenham dispensed opium dissolved in strong red wine or port. Following the lead of Paracelsus, he called it laudanum and wrote: “Here I cannot but break out in praise of the great God, the giver of all good things, who hath granted to the human race, as a comfort in their afflictions, no medicine of the value of opium.”
Throughout most of history, opium was consumed orally, either eaten as a solid (along with spices to make its bitter taste more palatable) or dissolved in a drink. But after smoking tobacco was introduced from the New World in the sixteenth century, people began to smoke opium in pipes for a quicker impact.
In 1700, British physician John Jones published Mysteries of Opium Reveal’d, asserting that the drug promoted “Ovations of the Spirits, Courage, Contempt of Danger, Magnanimity… Euphory… Satisfaction, Acquiescence, Contentation, Equanimity.” Yet Jones also described the horrors of withdrawal, which brought on “intolerable Distresses, Anxieties and Depressions of Spirits, which in a few days commonly end in a most miserable Death, attended by strange Agonies.”
Cultivating Poppies
POPPIES ARE ANNUALS rather than perennials, though they self-seed quite nicely. In Asia, they grow best at higher elevations, at 3,000 feet or more above sea level. The seeds sprout in warm, moist conditions and grow about 3 feet tall, producing a single blossom some ninety days after germination. The four delicate overlapping petals offer various shades of white through red and purple. Inside the flower is a ring of pollen-bearing anthers. Insects must quickly fertilize the plants, since the flowers last only a few days. After the petals drop, the globular seedpod grows to the size of a small egg, bluish green with a waxy surface. The pod’s outer skin protects the wall of the ovary, which produces over a thousand tiny bl
ack seeds. Once the pod dries, the seeds loosen and are dispersed through holes in the crown when the wind blows the swaying stem.
Opium is harvested before the pod dries, however, by making shallow parallel vertical incisions on the seedpods, beginning about a week after the petals have dropped. It is a delicate, labor-intensive process that must be done by hand, using a specialized metal tool. The cuts should be neither too shallow nor too deep. The sticky white latex sap oozes out and coagulates on the pod surface, where it turns brown and is scraped off the following day, using a blunt blade. The pods can be harvested repeatedly over the brief twelve days during which the pod is ripening. When the pod has dried, the sap flow ceases, and seeds can be collected for the next year’s planting.
The raw opium is sun-dried for several days. As it loses water, it becomes pliable, like putty, and can be beaten and molded into bricks, then wrapped in leaves or plastic. If properly prepared, it does not ferment or rot. To purify the opium further, it must be cooked in boiling water, sieved, and reduced to a clay-like consistency. Opium is an ideal product for trade and distribution because it is compact, non-perishable, and always in demand. Where there is trade, there is money. And where there is money, there is frequently conflict.
Seeds of Conflict
IN 1685, BY imperial decree, China tentatively opened the port of Canton to trade with Europeans, though the western “Barbarians” were kept at a distance. The Chinese exported tea, silk, spices, and other products, in return for which European traders sent silver, iron, tin, pepper, cotton, and opium. The East India Company, that venerable British institution, conducted most of the trade. The Company virtually ruled much of India from 1700 until 1833, when its monopolistic charter lapsed.
Although the Chinese grew some poppies, the Indian opium supplied by the British was superior and better for smoking. It was so popular that the emperor prohibited the smoking of opium in 1729 out of concern for the growing addiction of his subjects, though opium imports weren’t restricted until 1799. That didn’t stop smuggling, and the British exploited their opium monopoly in India to push sales for all they were worth.
Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of the East India Company, was disturbed that many Indian laborers were becoming opium addicts, so he discouraged such Indian consumption. Meanwhile, back in his native Britain, opium remained legal and widely consumed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey were famous opium addicts of the early nineteenth century, while in 1850 novelist Charles Kingsley wrote that the British housewife needed “her pennord o’elevation, to last her out the week”—that is, a penny’s worth of opium. Victorian opium sedatives were commonly used to quiet crying babies.
After the East India Company charter lapsed in 1833, other British enterprises took over the opium trade with China, notably Jardine Matheson & Company, owned by William Jardine and James Matheson. Jardine called the sale of opium “the safest and most gentleman-like speculation I am aware of.” The founders became enormously wealthy, and their firm still thrives, though its website makes no mention of opium: “Founded as a trading company in China in 1832, Jardine Matheson is today a diversified business group focused principally on Asia.”
American entrepreneurs also jumped into the opium trade. In 1830 the first fast clipper ship, the Red Rover, was able to make three round-trip passages a year to carry opium from India to China. Despite the official Chinese ban on the drug, addiction levels grew dramatically. When the Chinese made a serious effort to stop the opium trade, a British ship fired on a Chinese junk in 1839, starting what came to be known as the Opium War. That war ended three years later with the victorious British forcing China to open more ports to trade. As part of the treaty, Britain got Hong Kong as a colony. The Second Opium War (1856–1860) ended with another British triumph and the legalization of opium importation, albeit with a tariff.
Helpless to stop the continued importation of the drug, the Chinese decided to grow their own rather than continue to enrich the British, but that meant subjugating highland ethnic rebels of Yunnan Province, including the Chinese traders called Haw in Thailand (many of whom were Muslims) and the Hmong tribe. The imperial Chinese forces broke the rebellions with repeated massacres of men, women, and children in the late nineteenth century. In response, some tribes migrated into Burma and further south. These migrations would span a century.
Meanwhile, the Chinese were cultivating opium. By 1885, China was growing twice as much as it was importing. An 1888 article in the London Times reported, “A third of cultivation [in Yunnan Province] is devoted to poppy fields [and] this huge stock of Chinese opium is raised for the supply of scores of millions who never smoked before.” Two years later, the Chinese emperor revoked the official opium prohibition, sanctioning the domestic crop.
Despite various attempts to reverse the policy, and the successful revolution of 1912 led by Sun Yat-sen, poppy cultivation remained a driving force in Yunnan, the mountainous area of southern China where the Akha and other hill tribes lived before migrating south. After 1916, political chaos ensued, with warlords battling for control. “In some areas, opium cultivation became virtually mandatory,” wrote Martin Booth in his history of opium. “Local warlords used it as a source of income to fund guerrilla warfare. Farmers were forced to abandon food production and cultivate poppies.” This pattern would be repeated throughout Southeast Asia for decades to come.
A 1921 visitor to Yunnan wrote, “We heard much about the poverty of the district and the increasing cultivation of opium poppy. It is tragic to see this when a few years ago the land was filled with crops needed for the daily food of the people. In some parts half the crops are opium, and it demands a great deal of labor!”
Meanwhile, the hill tribe migration continued. “Their movement south was primarily to flee fighting between warlords and bandits and rampant disorder in late nineteenth century [and] early twentieth century southern China,” wrote Ronald Renard in Opium Reduction, his book about opium in Thailand. “As the minorities moved south, the cash-cropping of opium moved with them.”
The Chinese Haw became the primary opium traders, carrying the product in long mule-trains through the mountains. They supplied opium to the black market in Thailand, where a royal monopoly had been in place since the British pressured Siam (as Thailand was then known) to legalize the drug in 1855. The Thai government set an artificially high price on legal opium for the Bangkok opium dens, so the Haw smuggled cheaper produce through the mountains, where, along the way, they also bought a small amount of the drug from hill tribe farmers.
Opium and the Akha
THE AKHA AND other hill tribes may have grown poppies for medicinal purposes for centuries, but opium only became a cash crop in the 1800s, thanks to the Opium Wars and British traders. Before that, the drug was probably only a minor part of their lives. According to anthropologist Leo Alting von Geusau, opium is not mentioned in any Akha ritual texts or songs. In the book Plants and People of the Golden Triangle, however, Edward Anderson recounts this Akha legend about the origin of opium:
There was once a girl so beautiful that men came from all over the world to court her. Of these many men, only seven gained her affection and became her lovers. One day, all seven arrived at her house at the same time. She decided to make love with all of them, even though she knew it would make her die, because it was better than choosing only one man, thus making the others bitter and causing conflict. The girl asked her people to care for her grave, promising to send up a beautiful flower (opium) that would grow from her heart. She also said that anyone who tasted the fruits of this flower would want to taste them again and again. Finally, she warned them to be very careful, for the fruits bore both good and evil.
It would appear, then, that the Akha had been aware of the seductive, dangerous qualities of the drug for a long time. Still, it was only through the influence of the British in the nineteenth century and the Chinese, Burmese, and Americans during the twentieth century that opium became a major
problem. As Ronald Renard observed, “Where there is opium cultivation, there will be opium use and then opium addiction. Because opium is such good medicine and also because of the lack of alternatives in the hills, opium was widely used for various ailments. This got a lot of the users addicted.” Even walking through a field of poppies with harvested seedpods could produce a mild narcotic effect.
In 1934, a British advisor to Thailand’s Ministry of Finance proposed that the hill tribes in northern Thailand should be encouraged to grow more opium in order to discourage smuggling from Burma. That way, he said, tribal people could become integrated into Thai life and become “more civilized.” In 1938, the government decided to promote poppy cultivation in Chiang Rai, but World War II intervened and the plan was apparently dropped.
Some Akha men proved to be particularly vulnerable to the drug. Paul Lewis was studying at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1946. As Lewis was preparing to depart for Burma, his instructor, Dr. James Telford, who had worked as a missionary in Burma in the 1930s, warned him that a disproportionate number of Akha were addicts. In his work during the 1950s and 1960s, Lewis found that to be true. More Akha than Lahu were habituated to opium. “As many as 25 percent of some Akha villagers took opium, and about 5 percent were seriously addicted,” Lewis recalled. In the next few decades, the problem grew worse, so that one writer in 1983 estimated that 30 percent of Akha adult males in Thailand were opium addicts.
Cold War Opium and the CIA
IT WAS ONLY after the Communists took over China in 1949 that opium cultivation in Southeast Asia exploded. Through harsh measures, the new Communist dictatorship of Mao Zedong successfully wiped out Chinese poppies, leaving a huge gap in the world market that was filled by hill tribe cultivation in Burma, Thailand, and Laos.
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