Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/266

tain term of imprisonment, his assistants being bambooed and transported. So too every one connected with the carriage or import of the drug, and every official responsible for its admission or circulation, became liable to severe punishment.

There can be no reasonable doubt that the drafters of these drastic laws were in earnest, or that they regarded opium-smoking as a vice destructive alike of the physique and of the morale. It is to be observed, too, that the vetoes were enacted long before any question had arisen between the Chinese Government and the importers of the drug: no such question presented itself seriously until the nineteenth century. But whether the prohibitory edicts emanating from Peking became practically operative in the provinces, there seem to be no means of determining conclusively. There do not exist, so far as is publicly known, any records of punishments inflicted under the law, and the drug continued to be imported, paying a duty of only a pound sterling, approximately, per chest (133 lbs.). Nominally the imported drug was intended for medicinal purposes alone, and under that pretext the quantity arriving at Canton increased steadily from 200 chests in 1730 to 1,000 chests in 1767. The trade was then entirely in the hands of the Portuguese. But in 1773, after the conquest of Bengal by Clive, English merchants began to interest themselves in the article, and in 1781 the