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the southwestern drug industry. But to no avail. Opium in ever greater quantities continued to flow south along the Red River into Vietnam transported by enormous caravans, and from there by sea to Hong Kong and Canton, or eastward overland through China. Nothing could stem the tide, and by 1840—during the first Opium War with Britain—Yunnan was the acknowledged heart of domestic opium production in China. Not all of Yunnan’s opium left the province, of course. By this time, more than half of Yunnan’s garrisoned soldiers were reckoned to be drug users, including the officer corps. 22
    What caused Yunnan’s sudden transformation, in less than two decades, from a grain-producing province well integrated with the empire’s agricultural system to a rogue narco-state in thrall to the international drug trade? With Tambora’s specific dates in mind, what follows is a probable scenario.
    By the time of the Tambora emergency, the commercialization of agriculture in southwest China had evolved to the point where self-sufficiency was not the dominant working rationale of the common Yunnanese farmer. Rather, he found himself forced into the marketplace to raise money for taxes and buy grain in the off-season. In this light, the state bureaucrats who habitually railed to the court against the “stupidity” of the peasants for selling their excess harvest rather than storing it as a wedge against crop failure appear disingenuous indeed. For the low-acreage farmer subject to this commercial market, and in the teeth of a famine, opium must have represented an irresistible temptation: the poppy was worth twice as much per acre of yield than the average grain crop and would grow in inhospitable conditions on marginal soil. Sown in the fall, the opium flower grew to maturity in March and could be harvested for its sap in summer. It could thus to some degree be grown in conjunction with, or as supplement to, conventional food crops. At a critical point in the late 1810s, after years of the worst famine in their experience, the desperate peasant farmers of Yunnan came to the collective realization that opium was as good as money and more reliable than food.
    Figure 5.4. This British illustration dating from China’s humiliating defeat in the first Opium War (1839–42) puts a benevolent face on opium addiction. The mood in this Chinese “opium den” seems recreational, even festive. Not visible in the image is an acknowledgment of Britain’s vital trade interest in expanding its market of Chinese drug users or the devastating long-term effects of mass opium consumption on Chinese society. (Thomas Allom, China in a Series of Views Displaying the Scenery, Architecture, and Social Habits of That Ancient Empire [London, 1843–47], 3:54).
    Whatever the advisability of large-scale conversion of land to opium production from the empire’s point of view, for the individual freehold farmer of Yunnan, food security was best served by significant investment in opium as a security against grain shortfalls and the recurrence of famine. Just as important, growth in poppy production served the interests of unsalaried local officials themselves, who were under pressure to meet tax revenue both to pay their own wages and to remit quotas to the court. The empire’s long-successful system of provincial revenue extraction failed to adapt to the drastic climate change episode of 1815–18 after which the lure of opium as a cash crop was overwhelming. Once the opium land conversion had occurred, officials had no incentive to enforce anticultivation measures when they could tax the lucrative crop instead. In 1820s Yunnan, the foxes took guard of the opium henhouse.
    In short, faced with multiyear food shortages in the Tambora years of 1815–18, Yunnan’s farmers found they could neither grow rice nor buy it when they most needed it. Circumstantial evidence suggests that they subsequently settled on an opium solution to their chronic food security