Seven Flowers

by Jennifer Potter

  For Britain’s East India Company the trade worked well, almost too well. The price of a chest of opium rose almost six-fold between 1799 and 1814, attracting competition from Americans trading in Turkish opium, and from Malwa opium, shipped directly from Bombay, which came from areas under princely rather than Company control. Eventu ally even Malwa opium was forced to contribute to Company coffers through a transit tax; and the Company was able to manipulate opium prices to protect its interests, setting a trend for more opium at lower prices.

  Corruption was rife and despite the Chinese government’s best efforts to rid itself of the drug, imports to Canton on British accounts rose from 4,600 chests in 1819–20 to 23,570 chests in 1832–3. The situation then became confused, as smuggling along the Chinese coast opened up other entry points and the Company lost its opium monopoly. By the start of the first Opium War in 1839, however, the British were exporting 40,200 chests of opium from Bengal, and within China the number of opium smokers was also rising rapidly. One contemporary estimate for 1838 calculated as many as 4–5 million addicts among a population of some 400 million. Certain professions were particularly at risk, notably private secretaries and soldiers, and what began as an indulgence among the sons of the wealthy and privileged gradually spread to people of every description: ‘mandarins, gentry, workers, merchants, servants, women, and even nuns, monks, and Taoist priests’. A contrary view argues that it is wrong to portray China as the passive victim of colonial interests; for many people in China, producing and consuming opium were normal – not deviant – activities, while Chinese opium policy was rooted in internal court politics that pitted Han scholars against the officials of the ruling Manchu dynasty. Britain was nonetheless engaged in an illegal trade, which hastened China’s national decline.

  Alarmed by the damage inflicted on China, the Emperor called on Commissioner Lin Zexu, a committed prohibitionist, to eradicate opium. Although he successfully forced British merchants to hand over some of their illegal stocks, the Chinese were powerless to stop the smuggling that continued along the coast. Within two years, the superior technology and agile tactics of a small British expeditionary force had defeated the demoralized Chinese army. The terms of the peace treaty were severe: China was forced to compensate merchants for their destroyed stocks; to cede the island of Hong Kong; and to open the ports of Amoy, Fuzhou, Shanghai and Ningbo to foreign trade.

  The war had done nothing to legalize the opium trade, however. This required a second war, sparked in 1856 when the Chinese arrested a smuggling boat near Canton flying British colours, albeit with an expired licence. Hostilities were even more extensive and Britain joined forces with France in attacking Beijing. Peace forced further concessions from the Chinese: the opening of more treaty ports to trade with the West, and permission for foreigners, including missionaries, to enter the country. The now legalized opium trade was to be regulated by the Chinese authorities, Kowloon ceded to the British, and large in-demnities paid to Britain and France. Viewed by many as both a cause and a symptom of China’s social degeneration, the opium poppy could now also be credited with dismantling the country’s isolationism. But moral responsibility for China’s spiralling addiction to opium lay with Britain and those western powers that sought to profit from this trade.

  IRONICALLY, WHILE THE West used force to maintain the supply of opium to China, the Chinese were exporting their opium-smoking habits back to the West. Attracted by the Californian Gold Rush, Chinese immigrants arrived in San Francisco, establishing ethnic communities to serve their needs as they spread throughout California and the American West. Opium dens appeared alongside restaurants, general stores, laundries and doctors’ surgeries; and opium for smoking could be purchased legally in practically any US Chinatown, imported and distributed by Chinese secret societies. At first, only young Chinese men frequented them, as described in typically lurid detail by Mark Twain, who visited one Pacific-coast den at 10 p.m. when

  the Chinaman may be seen in all his glory. In every little cooped-up, dingy cavern of a hut, faint with the odor of burning Josh-lights and with nothing to see the gloom by save the sickly, guttering tallow candle, were two or three yellow, long-tailed vagabonds, coiled up on a sort of truckle-bed, smoking opium, motionless and with their lustreless eyes turned inward from excess of satisfaction.

  By the early 1870s opium had spread to the Anglo-American underworld and the habit penetrated further into society, threatening the values of the elite and middle classes. Xenophobia and moral panic ensued. As the Reno Evening Gazette declared in 1879, opium smoking was ‘a foul blot on society – a hideous, loathsome moral leprosy, paralyzing the mind and wrecking the body. It is a foul cancer, eating the vitals of society and destroying all who are drawn within its horrible spell.’

  14. Opium smoking in London: Gustave Doré’s illustration of the Lascar’s room in Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, for London: A Pilgrimage (1872)

  The way to curb its power, it was felt, was not by making opium illegal (although that would eventually happen in 1909, when the US Congress approved a bill to prohibit the importation and use of opium for other than medicinal purposes), but rather to close the door to people seen as the primary dealers in opium. This prompted the introduction of a series of exclusion laws aimed at keeping out ‘undesirables’, identified initially as contract labourers from Asia, Asian women who might engage in prostitution, and foreign convicts; in time this was extended to all skilled and unskilled Chinese labourers. More legislation followed, making it illegal to grow opium poppies without a licence, and later to cultivate, grow or harvest the plant. (‘Knowingly’ or ‘intentionally’ growing opium poppies in the United States remains a felony, as the American food and garden writer Michael Pollan reported in Harper’s Magazine, after a fellow journalist was arrested for just such an offence.)

  The ban on Chinese immigration was rescinded only in the 1940s. Long before then, the still-innocent poppy fields in L. Frank Baum’s children’s story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) had given way to the sleazy images of opium addiction and crime peddled by pulp fiction and American movies. In Britain, too, the ‘panacea’ that had been used to pacify fretful babies was now vilified as an Asiatic peril, smoked in clichéd opium dens in vile back alleys of the sort visited by Dr Watson in Conan Doyle’s short story, ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, where bodies with lacklustre eyes lay in ‘strange fantastic poses’ in long low rooms, ‘thick and heavy with brown opium smoke, and terraced with wooden berths, like the forecastle of an immigrant ship’.

  The final chapter in the opium poppy’s story belongs to the laboratory, and the chemical advances that have bolstered its power for good and evil. Around 1804, the German pharmacist Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner isolated a crystalline salt from opium, which he named morphium after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. He waited more than a decade before publishing his discovery; it was the first – and most significant – opium alkaloid to be identified, as well as the first active ingredient to be isolated from any medicinal plant or herb.

  In all, the opium poppy contains more than forty alkaloids, which constitute around 25 per cent by weight of powdered opium and trigger its pharmacological effects. The poppy’s essential contradictions – as a flower that is both beneficial and socially dangerous – are inherent in its chemical composition: some of these alkaloids depress while others excite the central nervous system. The most narcotic is morphine, while at the opposite extreme is thebaine, which produces strychnine-like convulsions. Other alkaloids derived from opium include papaverine, codeine and narcotine.

  Although purified morphine allowed the prescription of exact doses, opium became more dangerous as its chemistry was better understood and manipulated. In 1874, the English chemist Alder Wright boiled together morphine and acetic anhydride to produce diacetylmorphine, a semi-synthetic opioid known as heroin in its illegal form. Wright’s discovery languished, unused, until the substance was independently re-synthesized by
the German pharmaceuticals company Bayer, who marketed it from 1898 as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough medicine for children. Only later were its dangers recognized and its sale controlled from 1914.

  Today, perhaps as little as 5 per cent of the world’s annual opium harvest is used legally in medicine; the rest is consumed illicitly, much of it trafficked around the world to an estimated 12–21 million ‘recreational’ users, generating an estimated revenue of US $68 billion for the traffickers. Heroin is the most commonly used opiate, except among traditional opium-producing countries and their close neighbours, where opium is the norm. Globally, some 195,700 hectares are under cultivation to the opium poppy, nearly two-thirds of these in Afghanistan, although disease among Afghani poppies drastically reduced the amount of opium actually produced worldwide from 7,853 million tonnes in 2009 to 4,860 million tonnes in 2010.

  Production reflects the realities of national and international politics. Mao Zedong’s strict anti-opium policy virtually eradicated opium cultivation in China in the 1950s, but fluctuating production levels in Afghanistan present a less encouraging prognosis. While the Taliban seemed at first determined to cleanse Afghanistan of opium, pragmatism has prevailed since the movement was ousted from power, and its attitude towards the drug’s production has become as ambiguous as that of both the government in Kabul and local warlords. Elsewhere, over the past decade, South-East Asia’s ‘Golden Triangle’ has seen reductions in Vietnam and Thailand, although cultivation has increased in neighbouring Burma (Myanmar) and Laos. India no longer produces much opium, and the fields of opium poppies so vividly described by Amitav Ghosh in Sea of Poppies, the first of his Opium Wars trilogy, have mostly disappeared. No longer will their sweet, heady odour draw swarms of insects whose congealed bodies would add welcome weight to the harvest.

  POPPIES, THOUGH, HAVE a habit of reappearing when least expected, as was discovered by one English gardener who moved in 2007 with her family to a small farmhouse in the Herefordshire country side. After digging over her ‘field’ to prepare new flower borders, she was astonished the following spring by an explosion of red, mauve and lilac opium poppies, swaying gently in the breeze ‘like a cavalcade of cardinals’. Here were Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘crush-silk poppies aflash’ in his poem ‘The Woodlark’, echoing John Ruskin’s bewitched description in Proserpina, and the resplendent scarlet double-flowered poppies of the sort praised by John Parkinson. An earlier house on the site had belonged to an apothecary; as poppy seeds last for a hundred years or more, perhaps some of his seeds had lain dormant ever since, waiting for someone to expose them to light, and so to life.

  5

  Rose

  I see you, rose, half-open book

  filled with so many pages

  of that detailed happiness

  we will never read.

  RAINER MARIA RILKE, from ‘Les Roses’, trans. A. Poulin Jr

  15. Roses, drawn and engraved by Crispin de Passe the Younger, Hortus Floridus, 1614 (Courtesy of Dover Publications, Inc.)

  SOON AFTER THE publication of my book, The Rose: A True History, in 2010, I attended an auction at Sotheby’s of some fifty watercolours of roses executed on vellum by the great Belgian artist Pierre-Joseph Redouté, flower painter to Napoleon Bonaparte’s first wife, the Empress Josephine. All the watercolours went to a single, anonymous buyer. The most expensive, which sold for over £250,000 against an estimate of £50,000 to £70,000, was a dusky pink Autumn damask, renowned since the sixteenth century as the first western rose to flower more than once in a season. As flower and as art, this painted Damask is exquisite, its translucent petals darkening towards the centre, their softness in marked contrast to the spiny red prickles lining the pale green stem. Redouté’s skill as a botanical artist even hints at its heavenly fragrance: ‘If sunshine had a smell this would be it,’ remarked one retired perfumer of this particular rose.

  The lotus may have lured me to explore the power of flowers, but the rose remains my undisputed favourite. For five long years I tracked its bewildering transformations – culturally and botanically – in a quest that took me from the White House Rose Garden to the cities and deserts of Iran and on to the world’s largest rose garden at Sangerhausen in the former East Germany. Looking at life through such a singular focus was both exhilarating and exasperating. As I said in the introduction to that earlier book, I travel to a city and look first for the rose gardens. I listen to music and hear only rose songs. I journey to a country and find roses everywhere.

  The rose is a chameleon of a flower, and the range of its many incarnations is astonishing. Celebrated as a sacred symbol and as a token of womanhood, the rose unites Venus with the Virgin Mary, the blood of Christ with the sweat of Muhammad, the sacred and the profane, life and death, the white rose of chastity and the red rose of consummation. And the flower itself has evolved over the millennia, from a simple briar of the northern hemisphere to today’s sumptuous garden queen, bred for beauty, strength, fragrance and ‘charm’ – qualities described to me by one rose grower as ‘good doers’ that will also capture the heart. But rose lovers beware: we get the roses we deserve, and the trend towards well-behaved, homogeneous blooms and bushes may destroy the very qualities that make the rose so precious.

  IN THE WILD, rose flowers are pretty, usually modest in tone and often delicately scented, but they rarely catch your breath as might a pool of flowering lotus or a mountainside of wild tulips. Far more remarkable is the way the rose clings to life in the most inhospitable circumstances, its spiny prickles and pollinator-attracting scent aiding its survival strategies, and its natural promiscuity enabling it to hybridize in the wild, producing blooms with ever more petals and ever headier scent. A native of the northern hemisphere only, from the Tropic of Cancer up to the Arctic Circle, the rose has existed for millions of years, far longer than the so-called ‘rose fossils’ discovered in northern China and Alaska, both dating back some 35–40 million years.

  The simple, five-petalled roses glimpsed in the ‘Blue Bird fresco’ that once graced a Minoan town house at Knossos on Crete, some 3,500 years ago, are clearly wild and similar to the wild Cretan roses of today, Rosa pulverulenta. Painted in a naturalistic setting of rocks and stony ground, they are celebrated as the world’s oldest undisputed image of roses; but as wild flowers, they do not yet match the sophistication of the Cretan white lilies (see Chapter 2), which even then had found their way into town-house gardens and Minoan iconography.

  Slowly, over the next thousand years, far more magnificent roses were mutating in the wild so that by the fifth century BCE, the ever-curious Greek historian Herodotus reported roses growing wild in the Gardens of Midas in western Macedonia, ‘wonderful blooms, with sixty petals apiece, and sweeter smelling than any others in the world’. A century or so later, the Greek proto-botanist Theophrastus tells us that the citizens of eastern Macedonia were transplanting the best roses – some with as many as one hundred petals – from the slopes of Mount Pangaeus into their gardens, thus aiding the rose’s steady transformation into the western world’s favourite flower.

  While the Greeks created meanings for the rose through their arts, the Romans brought it to the very heart of daily life, making it an essential accompaniment to cooking, gardening, perfuming, feasting, drinking and debauchery, as well as the rites of both living and dying. Roses even enjoyed their own festival, Rosalia, a movable and raucous feast timed to coincide with the rose harvest, which appears in calendars from the first century CE. Not to be outdone, the notoriously degenerate Syrian legions of Rome’s imperial army adopted their own rose festival, the Rosaliae Signorum, when the legions’ standards were decorated with roses, giving the soldiers an excuse for revelry on a grand scale.

  For all his inaccuracies and garbled borrowings, the best guide to the roses actually grown in Roman times is Pliny the Elder in his encyclopedic Natural History, which described ten or so different sorts arranged according to place and scent. (Pliny believed t
hat roses owed their qualities to the nature of the soil, and he mixed in a mallow and the rose campion, Lychnis coronaria, with his true roses.) The most esteemed roses, he said, came from the areas around Rome and Naples (ancient Praeneste and Campania), to which some people added the bright-red roses of Miletus on the western coast of Anatolia; the most scented came from North Africa, which together with Spain produced early roses throughout the winter. Roman Egypt also supplied early-flowering roses on a vast scale; at times it must have seemed as if the Empire was awash with roses.

  For a glimpse of the roses so dear to Pliny’s heart, take a look at the painted frescoes and mosaics of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which were sealed under a thick covering of lava and volcanic ash when Vesuvius erupted in CE 79, killing all who remained in the vicinity, including Pliny himself, but ironically preserving the cities’ flamboyant culture of flowers. Roses were everywhere in these mercantile centres of the Campanian plain, planted with vegetables, herbs and other flowers in private gardens; grown for profit in commercial flower gardens; painted on house and garden walls to give an illusion of perpetual summer. Of all the garden scenes, some of the most exquisite are to be found in the House of the Gold Bracelet where, on the south wall of its garden room, a small brown songbird perches on a hollow reed to which is tied a prickly red-and-white rose displaying every stage of flower, from bud to full bloom.