... was important to both Chinese and the British. For the Chinese, since opium smoking for pleasure was known, there was a growing demand for this drug. This led to increased foreign importation and to native cultivation in Szechuan, Fukien as well as other provinces. After the abolition of the East India Company's monopoly of the China trade, there was a further extension of opium traffic in China. It was estimated that the total number of smokers was somewhere between 2 and 10 million - more than 1% of the Chinese population were drug addicts. The addicts were not limited to the leisure classes but gradually the habit spread to people of other walks of life, even the poor took it up. The addicts also included government officials, yamen clerks, gentry, merchants, women, servants, soldiers and even monks, nuns and priests. The addicts acquired the drug for its deprivation would cause ...

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