01/18/10 -- Reg has just sent pictures of two unfamiliar opium can inscriptions. Both are said to have been found at a Chinese railroad camp in the Grants Pass area of Oregon. Fook Duk (Mandarin "Fude") is now known to be another Hong Kong brand (click here); there are others from Queensland in Australia and in the Asian American Comparative Collection in Moscow, Idaho. The Chi Wo Cheung (Mandarin/Pinyin Zhihe Xiang) example is unique. It is the first can we have seen that purports to come from Central, the main business district of Hong Kong

Victoria: The Largest Opium Making Center Outside Asia

域多利 - 加拿大最大的鸦片烟产地

Modern cruise ship passengers find Victoria to be charming, beautiful, and quite British. Few of them suspect that between 1860 and 1908, it was the opium capital of the New World—in fact, the largest opium refining center outside Asia. The most important research on Victoria opium is that of David Chuenyan Lai (see citation below); his advice has been central to our understanding of the subject.

Most recorded opium “factories” (i.e., refineries) in Victoria opened in the 1880s. The number peaked in 1889, when there were 15 on Cormorant, Government, and Fisgard Streets in Victoria’s Chinatown. Opium refining seems to have gotten its real start in Canada after 1880, when a new U.S. law restricted opium refining to American citizens (Culin 1891: 499). This caused would-be Chinese refiners, none of whom by law could become U.S. citizens, to move across the border to Victoria, which then held the largest Chinese community in Canada. The new industry took off and proved to be highly profitable, both for refining companies and for the national and local governments. The refining of smoking-type opium was not banned in Canada until 1908. Before then, refining and selling the drug in Canada was no more illegal than distilling whisky in Scotland.

All Victoria opium factories were owned and run by Chinese, although their main customers, large-scale smugglers, were overwhelmingly white. The industry generated a lot of tax money, which may be why the national government was slow to close it down. In 1865, a license fee of $100 was imposed on each seller of smoking opium; sellers of opium-containing patent medicines, all of them white, were exempted (Lai 1999: 22). The cost of a license had risen to $250 by 1886 (Lai, same). In 1868-1871, the duty on imported raw opium was 25% (City Directory 1868: 2058). In 1891 the peak year for customs duties on raw opium to be made into smoking opium, the revenue to the Canadian government was more than $140,000 (Lai, same). In 1884, when the city began to see a leap in the number of opium factories, 28 Chinese workers were refining opium (CCBA 1960, p. 58). More than a hundred still worked in Canadian opium factories, mostly in Victoria, in 1908 (Colonist 1908-07-14).

The following list and preceding chart of Victoria opium factories are the first ever published. They are works in progress and not yet complete. Some companies operated on a very small scale and only stayed in the opium refining (as distinguished from selling) business for a few years. None except Sing Wo Chan, a branch of Macao’s immensely wealthy Sing Wo Co., seem to have specialized in opium alone. The rest had multiple lines of business. Besides opium, they were also importers and sellers of textiles, teas, groceries, and other Chinese goods, and some were labor contractors as well. This list indicates the active years of each company, not the years in which they sold opium. None are known to have stayed in the opium business after 1908.

Primary sources: British Colonist 1858 through 1910, Ta Hon Kong Bo 1915 through 1925, Victoria city directories 1868 through 1909, International Chinese Directory 1901, Victoria’s Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association archival materials at the University of Victoria Library, epigraphic data at the Chinese Language Public School in Victoria, and Victoria City Archive.

Secondary sources: David Chuenyan Lai, “Chinese Opium Trade and Manufacture in British Columbia, 1858-1908”, Journal of the West, 1999 (38), No. 3, pp.21-26; (same author) Chinese Community Leadership, World Scientific Publishing, 2010; Stewart Culin "Opium Smoking by the Chinese," American Journal of Pharmacology, Oct 1891.

Canada's Other Opium Making Centers: Vancouver, New Westminster, Nanaimo

域多利以外加拿大其他洋烟生产地

All three cities had developed substantial Chinatowns by the end of the 19th century. Each is known to have contained opium "factories" (i.e., refiners). Thus far, we know the names of only two, both in Vancouver. According to the British Colonist, the two were the largest refiners in Vancouver when the Canadian Parliament made opium for smoking (but not for drinking or injecting) illegal in 1908.