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When Tea was worth its weight in Opium by Alan McKee
Imagine a crop so pro table that it was literally worth its weight in gold, so valuable that empires warred over it, and new technologies were developed
to transport it. No, I am not talking about tea but about the crop that was bound up with tea cultivation and which brought the British Empire to the pinna- cle of world power and wealth throughout the nineteenth cen- tury: Opium. Some historians have even said that without opi- um there would have been no Victorian era of British wealth and power, perhaps no Brit-
ish Empire. Certainly, history would have looked very di er-
ent. Even today, there are multi-na- tional corporations that got their start in the opium trade. e opium auctions at Bombay and Calcutta drew traders from many nations, each with their own super fast sail- ing cra , ships that would carry the drug past the ships of the Chinese emperor. Americans, Russians, Ger- mans, French, all stood in line to bid on chests of opium in the two great markets where opium was sold by the British. But what does this have to do with tea, the most widely used beverage, other than water, in the world?
Tea and opium share a long and in- terconnected history. e opium
e SeaWitch,
a fabulously fast and manoeuvre- able sailing ship used to carry opium. One of the legendary ‘opium clippers.’