In Search of Yingde’s Opium

An Unsolved Mystery in the Local History of Republican Guangdong

1. An Unexpected Clue

Yingde lies in northern Guangdong, along the middle reaches of the Bei River. Today, the name is likely to bring to mind Yingde black tea, limestone peaks, or the mountain scenery of northern Guangdong. Few people would associate the place with opium. Yet in an old account of Guangzhou’s opium dens in 1947, we came across a rather startling passage:

Yubei opium was produced in Yingde, Guangdong, a region of rugged mountains. In places such as Huangzhai, Huanghua, Sanshan, Jiaogang, and Shilian, local bullies and unscrupulous gentry colluded with the military and police stationed there, taking advantage of the situation to cultivate opium poppies…

The article goes on to describe this opium as exceptionally fragrant and highly prized, commanding prices even higher than those of Dalian opium, another variety sold on the market at the time. The author also tells us that poppies were sown every September and harvested the following March. When the plants flowered, blossoms covered the fields, their fragrance carrying for miles. There is something almost poetic about the description. Forget for a moment what those flowers would eventually become, and one might imagine oneself reading a travel essay about springtime in northern Guangdong.

But what caught our attention was not this extraordinary pastoral scene. It was a simple question:

Did Yingde really produce opium?

The article, titled Opium Dens in Guangzhou in 1947, appeared on the Guangzhou Municipal Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference’s historical materials website, in a section devoted to Volume IX of Collected Unpublished Historical Materials of Guangzhou. A copy of the webpage survives in the Internet Archive. [1] This establishes at least one thing: a historical account of opium smoking in Republican-era Guangzhou explicitly identified Yingde as the source of a particular variety of opium.

But finding a historical statement is not the same as establishing its truth.

And there was something else about the passage that puzzled us.

The author called the opium produced in Yingde Yubei huo (禺北货), or “Yubei goods.”

But doesn’t Yubei mean northern Panyu?

2. Two Places Called Yubei

We soon discovered another article, Opium in Guangdong During the Japanese Occupation, by Xu Yaozhen. Xu recalled that between 1940 and 1945 he had worked as an inspector for an opium-control agency under the Japanese-sponsored administration. His account describes the production, transportation, and sale of opium during the occupation of Guangzhou. Unlike an ordinary reminiscence about opium dens, Xu’s account also deals with the administrative regulation of the trade and the classification of opium sold on the market. [2]

Xu, too, mentions a variety called Yubei tu (禺北土), or “Yubei opium.” But according to him, it came not from Yingde, but from Jiahe, Longgui, Renhe, Nancun, Beicun, Zhuliao, Zhongluotan, and several other places. These localities lay in the northern part of what was then Panyu County, in the outskirts north of Guangzhou.

And there was another curious detail.

Xu described Yubei opium as being “planted in the ninth month and harvested in the third.” The two accounts thus used nearly identical names for a commodity, described the same planting and harvesting seasons, yet placed its origin in two quite different locations.

Which author had got it wrong?

Perhaps Yubei huo and Yubei tu were simply different names for the same product, and the author of the 1947 account had confused its place of origin. Perhaps Yubei had become a commercial designation that no longer referred strictly to geographical origin. There was also a third possibility: the two authors might have been describing different periods in the opium trade. Xu’s recollections concerned primarily the years 1940–1945. Opium Dens in Guangzhou in 1947, however, looked back beyond 1947 to the years when Chen Jitang governed Guangdong.

The classification of opium sold on the market need not have remained unchanged over the intervening years. All these explanations were plausible.

But plausibility is not evidence.

We decided to put the mystery of Yubei aside for the moment and investigate the five place names mentioned in the first account. After all, an author might easily misremember the name of a commodity. Inventing five actual villages or towns out of thin air would be rather more difficult.

Or so we thought.

3. Five Place Names

Huangzhai. Huanghua. Sanshan. Jiaogang. Shilian. Five names, like five pins stuck into an old map that had yet to be unfolded. The first was Huangzhai. Consulting materials on Yingde’s administrative history, we discovered that today’s Jiulong Town, in Yingde, had once been known as Huangzhai. An account published by the local government explicitly records this earlier name. [3]

The second was Huanghua. Yingde still has a town called Huanghua, situated in its southwestern region, adjacent to Jiulong. The area is characterized by dense clusters of limestone peaks, with basins of varying sizes scattered among the mountains. Both places could therefore be matched with the names in the article. Things were beginning to get interesting.

The third name was Sanshan (三杉). It looked rather peculiar. For a while, we wondered whether it might be a mistaken rendering of another name, Sanshan (三山), written with a different second character. Then a further search of local administrative histories turned up an intriguing clue. According to a secondary source, around 1945 two townships, Sanshan (三山) and Shanshu (杉树), were merged to form a new township called Sanshan (三杉), combining characters from the two earlier names.

If this account is correct, the peculiar name was no mistake at all. It may have been an administrative designation belonging to a very particular period.

The year was 1945.

And the article we were investigating concerned Guangzhou in 1947.

The dates fitted remarkably well. There was, however, a difficulty. We had not verified this administrative change against a Republican-era county gazetteer or contemporary government records. We could not therefore conclude that the author had used a township name introduced after 1945. [4] The fourth name was Shilian. In historical accounts of the area around Dawan, in Yingde, we found references to such administrative names as Shilian tu and Shilian Township.

Thus, of the five names, four now had at least some degree of correspondence with historical localities. The remaining name, Jiaogang, proved more elusive. Older materials contained a similar-looking name, Jiaogang (蕉冈), written with a different first character. But we could not establish that the two referred to the same place. [5] Nor had we found a Republican-era map of Yingde on which all five locations could be identified with confidence.

Still, there was something noteworthy about the geography. Huangzhai and Huanghua lay in southwestern Yingde. Sanshan and Shilian may have belonged to the historical geography of the county’s western or northwestern districts. These were not names scattered randomly across Guangdong. And the original article’s description of a region of rugged mountains was, at the very least, consistent with the terrain.

Could it be that the author really did know Yingde?

We began to suspect that our clue might be more reliable than we had initially imagined.

But we had to remind ourselves of something important:

The existence of the places did not establish the existence of the poppy fields.

Someone might know a region’s mountains, rivers, villages, and towns intimately, yet be mistaken about its economic activities. What we needed was independent evidence. Preferably, a government document from the period.

4. A Surprise in the Archives

Our next stop was the publicly accessible catalog of the Guangdong Provincial Archives.

And this time, we really did find records from the Republican-era government of Yingde County.

One document, dated 1938, concerned a production cooperative in Huangzhai Township. There were others, also relating to Huangzhai, extending as far as 1942.

Precisely the years we were interested in. Better still, these were not recollections written decades after the events. They were documents produced in the course of county government administration. For a moment, we thought we had found our breakthrough. Then we looked more closely at the titles.

One read:

Articles of Association of the Gold-Panning Production Cooperative of Aotou Village, Huangzhai Township, Yingde County.

Gold panning?

Yes. Gold panning.

Another document concerned the articles of association of the Fantuling Gold-Panning Cooperative. A third related to the Taiyue Gold-Panning Production Cooperative in Huangzhai Township. We had gone looking for opium.

And found gold. [6]

Under ordinary circumstances, this might have counted as a stroke of good fortune. For historians investigating opium cultivation, however, it was a rather exasperating discovery. The documents were not entirely without value. They established that Huangzhai Township appeared in Yingde County’s administrative records in the late 1930s and early 1940s. They also demonstrated that the Guangdong Provincial Archives held government records concerning Yingde from precisely the period we were investigating.

But they told us nothing about whether poppies were grown in Huangzhai.

Nor could we infer that because a locality had gold-panning cooperatives, its inhabitants must also have been involved in the opium trade. For the moment, the trail ended there. We tried again, searching the archives for terms such as “opium prohibition,” “poppy seedlings,” “poppy cultivation,” and “eradication of opium crops.” Still, we found no document that independently established poppy cultivation in Yingde.

Our investigation was beginning to assume a familiar shape. At first, a clue seems to lead straight toward an answer. Then, with every step forward, another question appears.

5. Opium and the Wartime Economy

As our search continued, however, a larger historical picture began to emerge. The opium economy of Republican Guangdong was far from static. During Chen Jitang’s administration, opium prohibition, local government revenue, military and political power, and the opium trade were entangled in complicated ways. How these relationships manifested themselves specifically in Yingde remains to be established.

After the Japanese occupation of Guangzhou in 1938, the situation changed again. The occupation authorities and their sponsored institutions used opium as one means of generating revenue and controlling the market. Organizations such as Fumintang participated in the management and distribution of opium, while poppy cultivation in the surrounding region became part of the wartime economy. [7] Xu Yaozhen’s recollections are particularly revealing.

The Guangzhou he describes was not merely a consumer market supplied by opium from distant provinces. It was also the center of a regional network of cultivation, transportation, processing, and distribution. Several districts around Guangzhou produced local varieties of opium sold under different names. The war could also alter the relative importance of these products. When transportation from northeastern China and other distant producing regions was disrupted, locally produced opium had opportunities to capture a larger share of the market.

Xu recalled that after the outbreak of the Pacific War in late 1941, difficulties in obtaining outside supplies made locally grown opium from Guangzhou’s outskirts and neighboring counties increasingly important. [8] Against this background, the 1947 account’s reference to Yingde no longer seemed entirely isolated. If Yingde did produce opium, it might have formed part of this wider regional network.

But there was a logical gap we could not bridge.

The existence of local opium production in Guangdong did not establish that Yingde was one of the producing areas. Even if poppies had been cultivated there, that would tell us nothing about the scale of production or Yingde’s share of the Guangzhou market. Moreover, the descriptions of Yingde opium’s fragrance, reputation, and price still came principally from that one account of Guangzhou’s opium dens. We had found no independent price lists, commercial ledgers, seizure records, or transportation documents.

Yingde’s opium seemed determined to remain where we had first encountered it: In the pages of an old article.

6. Back to Yubei

At this point, we had little choice but to return to our original question.

What exactly was Yubei huo?

What now seemed most striking was not simply that the two accounts disagreed about its place of origin, but that they shared a peculiar combination of details. One named Yingde; the other, northern Panyu. One called the product Yubei huo; the other, Yubei tu. Both described it as being planted in September and harvested in March.

We could not rule out the possibility that the authors were describing similar products from different regions. Nor could we rule out a confusion of geographical names.

But there was another possibility, one that called for particular caution.

The information underlying the two accounts might not have been independent in the first place. Historical reminiscences often combine firsthand observation, stories heard at the time, and memories reconstructed many years afterward. If two accounts repeat the same claim, that does not necessarily make them two independent witnesses. This was especially important in the case of the 1947 article.

In describing Yingde, the author used an expression meaning “according to fellow opium smokers.” The term daoyou (道友), literally “companions on the Way,” was used among opium smokers to refer to one another. In other words, the author attributed at least part of his information to stories circulating among smokers. Such people might have been extraordinarily knowledgeable about the aroma, price, quality, and smoking characteristics of different varieties of opium.

But that did not mean they had ever seen the fields where those varieties were grown.

We were therefore forced to distinguish between two kinds of knowledge. One was the commercial knowledge circulating in Guangzhou’s opium dens. The other concerned the agricultural activities actually taking place in the villages of Yingde. The two might have been connected.

But they were not the same thing.

Knowing that a variety of opium was called Yubei huo did not necessarily mean knowing where it came from. Conversely, even if the author had accurately recorded five place names in Yingde, that did not establish the accuracy of his claim about the origin of the opium. By now, we realized that our investigation had become something more than a question of local economic history.

It was also a question about how historical knowledge is formed, transmitted, and remembered.

7. What We Did Not Find

What we had hoped to discover was a Republican-era survey of opium cultivation in Yingde County. Ideally, it would have listed the year, the township, and the acreage under cultivation. A county government report on the eradication of poppy crops would have been even better. Perhaps such documents survive in archival collections not yet open to researchers.

Perhaps they have long since disappeared. We have not found them. Nor have we found transportation records establishing that opium grown in Yingde was shipped down the Bei River to Guangzhou. Yingde lies along the middle reaches of that river and has long been connected to Guangzhou by established transportation routes.

The geography makes such trade possible.

But geographical possibility is no substitute for evidence of actual commerce.

As for the original article’s allegation that local gentry colluded with military and police authorities in the cultivation of opium, we have likewise found no independent case records with which to verify it. To declare, at this point, that Yingde was an important opium-producing region of Republican Guangdong—and then proceed to describe the scale of its production or the routes by which its opium reached the market—would be to go beyond what the available evidence permits.

Yet it would be equally unfair to conclude that our investigation had accomplished nothing. We had established several things. First, a historical account of Guangzhou’s opium dens in 1947 explicitly identified Yingde as a source of opium. Second, several of the place names mentioned in that account corresponded, to varying degrees, with names found in Yingde’s historical geography. The account could not therefore be dismissed simply as an invention without any geographical basis.

Third, other recollections of the Japanese occupation of Guangzhou clearly described local opium production, but located the source of Yubei tu in northern Panyu, leaving an unresolved contradiction between the accounts. Fourth, Republican-era administrative records from Yingde did survive, although the documents we had located did not establish that poppies were cultivated there. None of these findings proved our original hypothesis.

None disproved it, either. They merely brought the outlines of the problem into sharper focus.

8. An Unsolved Case

Historical research has a temptation that is difficult to resist. When a clue seems to be leading toward an answer, we naturally want to follow it to the end. An old newspaper. A recollection. A handful of unfamiliar place names. A map. An archival catalog. Any one of them might turn out to be the key that unlocks the past.

But a key does not always open the door.

Sometimes it merely reveals another door behind it. We set out to find Yingde’s opium, thinking that we needed to answer only one simple question:

Were poppies actually grown there?

Instead, we discovered that we first had to determine what Yubei huo meant, why it was said to come from Yingde, and how much a Guangzhou opium smoker in 1947 could really have known about the mountainous countryside of northern Guangdong. We traced Huangzhai, Huanghua, Sanshan, and Shilian. We even located government records concerning Huangzhai Township dating back to 1938.

But the archives yielded no opium.

Only gold.

The five place names remain on the map.

And that vision of fields covered in fragrant poppy blossoms remains in the account of 1947.

Was it a genuine memory of local history?

A rumor circulating in the opium market, repeated until it acquired the appearance of fact?

Or a mixture of different memories, brought together many years after the events?

We do not yet know.

But we know at least this much: a vivid historical account must not be accepted as fact merely because it is vivid. Nor should it be dismissed as fiction simply because the supporting archival evidence has not yet been found. History does not guarantee an answer to every question.

And the value of an investigation does not depend entirely on whether the case is solved.

Sometimes the real discovery lies in finally understanding what it is that we do not know.

The opium of Yingde remains an unsolved mystery.

But an unsolved mystery is not necessarily a story unworthy of being told.

Notes

[1] Opium Dens in Guangzhou in 1947 (《民国36年，广州市的烟馆》), Guangzhou Municipal CPPCC historical materials website, in the section devoted to Volume IX of Collected Unpublished Historical Materials of Guangzhou. The original webpage path is dated August 26, 2008; a copy was archived by the Internet Archive on July 1, 2020. The passage concerning Yingde was checked against a screenshot of the webpage. The author’s attribution and page numbers in the printed volume remain unverified. The Guangzhou Municipal CPPCC confirms that the ten-volume collection was published in 2008 and contains previously unpublished historical materials collected between 1959 and 1986. ↩

[2] Xu Yaozhen (许耀震), Opium in Guangdong During the Japanese Occupation (《沦陷期间广东的鸦片》), reproduced by the War of Resistance Memorial website on April 2, 2018, with “Guangzhou Wartime Historical Materials” identified as its source. The online text confirms the author’s name and his account of serving as an inspector for an opium-control agency between 1940 and 1945. The original publication details and page numbers have not been verified. ↩

[3] Jiulong Town Government, Yingde, historical introduction to the town, published on the Yingde Municipal Government website. This source establishes the history of the place name Huangzhai; it does not establish the cultivation of opium poppies. ↩

[4] The reported merger of Sanshan (三山) and Shanshu (杉树) into Sanshan Township (三杉乡) around 1945 is based on secondary historical information that has not yet been verified against an original county gazetteer or contemporary administrative records. No firm chronological conclusion is drawn from it here. ↩

[5] Local Gazetteer of Yingde County (《英德县乡土志》), Republican-era copy held by the National Library of China; an electronic transcription is also available through the Shidian Ancient Texts database. Whether the name Jiaogang (蕉冈) in the historical material refers to the same locality as Jiaogang (焦岗) in the opium account remains uncertain. The precise administrative history of Shilian also requires further verification against the original gazetteer. ↩

[6] Guangdong Provincial Archives, public catalog of Republican-era records concerning gold-panning cooperatives in Huangzhai Township, Yingde County: ↩

004-005-0047-001–003: Documents concerning a model gold-panning cooperative in Huangzhai Township, 1938.
004-005-0047-064–083: Articles of association of the Aotou Village Gold-Panning Cooperative, 1938.
004-005-0047-092–111: Articles of association of the Fantuling Gold-Panning Cooperative, 1938.
004-005-0047-034–053: Articles of association of the Taiyue Gold-Panning Cooperative, 1942.

These references are based on catalog titles, dates, and archival identifiers. The original documents have not been examined.

[7] Wu Yangren (伍扬仁), Fumintang: An Opium-Trafficking Organization in Japanese-Occupied Guangzhou (《广州沦陷时期的贩毒机关福民堂》), in Collected Unpublished Historical Materials of Guangzhou, Vol. III; reproduced by the War of Resistance Memorial website on November 24, 2018. See also Xu Yaozhen, cited above. The two reminiscences differ in some details concerning Fumintang and the names of opium varieties and should not be treated as entirely consistent testimonies. Original page numbers remain unverified. ↩

[8] Xu Yaozhen, cited above, particularly the discussion of transportation difficulties and local opium supplies after late 1941. See also Wu Yangren’s account of the varieties known as Yubei tu, Yudong tu, and Huangpu tu. Differences between the two recollections should be assessed against their respective original texts. ↩

References

Opium Dens in Guangzhou in 1947 (《民国36年，广州市的烟馆》). Guangzhou Municipal CPPCC historical materials website, section devoted to Collected Unpublished Historical Materials of Guangzhou, Vol. IX. Archived webpage. Printed attribution and page numbers remain to be verified. Online source.
Xu Yaozhen (许耀震). Opium in Guangdong During the Japanese Occupation (《沦陷期间广东的鸦片》). Guangzhou Wartime Historical Materials; reproduced by the War of Resistance Memorial website, April 2, 2018. Original publication details remain unverified. Online source.
Wu Yangren (伍扬仁). Fumintang: An Opium-Trafficking Organization in Japanese-Occupied Guangzhou (《广州沦陷时期的贩毒机关福民堂》). In Collected Unpublished Historical Materials of Guangzhou, Vol. III. Beijing: China Literature and History Press, 2008. Online reproduction available; page numbers remain unverified. Online source.
Guangzhou Municipal CPPCC Committee for Learning and Historical Materials, ed. Collected Unpublished Historical Materials of Guangzhou (《广州文史资料存稿选编》). Ten volumes. Beijing: China Literature and History Press, 2008. See the Guangzhou Municipal CPPCC’s announcement of the collection’s publication. Online source.
Guangdong Provincial Archives. Catalog of Republican-Era Records Concerning Gold-Panning Cooperatives in Huangzhai Township, Yingde County, 1938–1942. Archival series 004-005-0047. Public catalog. Online source.
Local Gazetteer of Yingde County (《英德县乡土志》). Republican-era copy held by the National Library of China; electronic text available through the Shidian Ancient Texts database. Online source.
Jiulong Town People’s Government, Yingde. Historical introduction to Jiulong Town. Yingde Municipal Government website. Online source.