1 The art of alchemists, sex and court ladies
2 As the empire changed hands
3 ‘The age of calicoes and tea and opium’
4 ‘A hobby among the high and the low in officialdom’
5 Taste-making and trendsetting
6 The political redefinition of opium consumption
7 Outward and downward ‘liquidation’
8 ‘The volume of smoke and powder’
9 ‘The unofficial history of the poppy’
10 Opiate of the people
11 The road to St Louis
12 ‘Shanghai vice’
Conclusion

Shanghai was a paradise for the pleasure-seeker and the fortune hunter.
But it was also a hell where poverty and vice lived side by side with wealth
and God. Percy Finch, an American journalist who worked in Shanghai
from the 1920s to the 1940s, summed up the social life of opium there:

Opium from India and Sichuan was unloaded and safely stored in the
Settlement, where neither Chinese nor foreign laws applied. This required
the agreement of and payment to the French consular and the police
authorities. Not only did the French co-operate with the Green Gang,
they also made some gangsters members of the French detective squad
called the Chinese Uniform. Gang members also filled the ranks of the
Chinese police and made up the regular spate of smokers, as ‘pipes burned
within the shadow of the central police station’.

The French authority in Shanghai was indeed one of
the ‘opium regimes’. Not only that, France also controlled part of the
supply route – L’indochine. Sichuan and Yunnan opium were smuggled
through Indochina to Shanghai and other parts of China. The governor
of L’indochine authorised the transport of Chinese opium via Tokin.10
French historians have studied ‘la regie de l’opium en Cochinchine’ and ‘le
monopole auTonkin et en Annam’.11 The French profited fromL’indochine
and the Settlement in Shanghai; they also enjoyed smoking, as Guy
Brossollet marvelled: ‘quelques Franc¸ais participent au trafic. Quelques
autres, en quete de bonheur artificiels, fument.’12 The popularity of opium
among the French can be seen from La Belle ´epoque de l’opium and the
photography of Gyula Halasz Brassai.