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In An Opium FactoryRudyard KiplingEdited and Revised 2023
In An Opium FactoryiPrefaceIn An Opium Factory appeared in print on 16th April1888 in the Indian newspaper Pioneer and again on 17thApril 1888 in the Pioneer Mail.Kipling was 22 years old and, later, regarded some ofhis early work as immature. He omitted In An OpiumFactory from his Collected Works and never reprintedit. A copy turned up in an Adelaide attic discoveryalmost 120 years later—in 2007. Did Kipling suppressthe article or merely lose it? It is a piece of technical journalism, which the authormay have considered too didactic for the general reader.Also, he might not have wished to draw attention to animmoral trade. Opium was big business and the opiumfactory at Ghazipur resembled a grand mansion.Its profits fuelled the British Empire.
In An Opium FactoryiiGhazipur
iiiOpium Factory 1850
ivKipling's India 1880Edited and Published by SanPaperwith Notes and Glossaryemail: san2paper@gmail.com
In An Opium FactoryON the banks of the Ganges, forty miles below Benaresas the crow flies, stands the Ghazipur Factory, an opiummint as it were, whence issue the precious cakes that areto replenish the coffers of the Indian Government. Thebusy season is setting in, for with April the opiumcomes up from the districts after having run the gauntletof the district officers of the Opium Department, whowill pass it as fit for use. Then the really serious workopens, under a roasting sun. The opium arrives bychallans, regiments of one hundred jars, each holdingone maund, and each packed in a basket and sealedatop. The district officer submits forms—never wassuch a place for forms as the Ghazipur Factory—showing the quality and weight of each pot, and 1
with the jars comes a person responsible for the safecarriage of the string, their delivery, and their virginity.If any pots are broken or tampered with, an unfortunateindividual called the import-officer, and appointed towork like a horse from dawn till dewy eve, mustexamine the man in charge of the challan and reduce hisstatement to writing. Fancy getting any native to explainhow a jar has been smashed! But the Perfect Flower isabout as valuable as silver. Then all the pots have to be weighed, and the weight ofeach pot is recorded on the pot, in a book, and goodnessknows where else, and everyone has to sign certificatesthat the weighing is correct. The pots have beenweighed once in the district and once in the factory.None the less a certain number of them are taken atrandom and weighed afresh before they are opened.This is only the beginning of a long series of checks.Then the testing begins. Every single pot has to 2
be tested for quality. A native, called the purkhea,drives his fist into the opium, rubs and smells it, andcalls out the class for the benefit of the opium examiner.A sample picked between finger and thumb is throwninto a jar, and if the opium examiner thinks the purkheahas said sooth, the class of that jar is marked in chalk,and everything is entered in a book. Every ten samplesare put in a locked box with duplicate keys, and sentover to the laboratory for assay. With the tenth boxful—and this marks the end of the challan of a hundred jars—the Englishman in charge of the testing signs the test-paper, and enters the name of the native tester and sendsit over to the laboratory. For convenience’ sake, it maybe as well to say that, unless distinctly stated to thecontrary, every single thing in Ghazipur is locked, andevery operation is conducted under more than policesupervision. In the laboratory each set of ten samples is 3
thoroughly mixed by hand: a quarter-ounce lump isthen tested for starch adulteration by iodine, which turnsthe decoction blue, and, if necessary, for gumadulteration by alcohol, which makes the decoctionfilmy. If adulteration be shown, all the ten pots of thatset are tested separately till the sinful pot is discovered.Over and above this test, three samples of one hundredgrains each are taken from the mixed set of ten samples,dried on a steam-table, and then weighed forconsistence. The result is written down in a ten-columned form in the assay register, and by the meanresult are those ten pots paid for. This, after everythinghas been done in duplicate and countersigned,completes the test and assay. If a district officer hasclassed the opium in a glaringly wrong way, he is thuscaught and reminded of his error. No one trusts anyonein Ghazipur. They are always weighing, testing, andassaying. 4
Before the opium can be used it must be ‘alligated’ inbig vats. The pots are emptied into these, and specialcare is taken that none of the drug sticks to the hands ofthe coolies. Opium has a knack of doing this, andtherefore coolies are searched at most inopportunemoments. There are a good many Mahometans inGhazipur, and they would all like a little opium. The pots after emptying are smashed up and scraped,and heaved down the steep river-bank of the factory,where they help to keep the Ganges in its place, somany are they and the little earthen bowls in which theopium cakes are made. People are forbidden to wanderabout the river-front of the factory in search of remnantsof opium on the shards. There are no remnants, butpeople will not credit this. After vatting, the big vats,holding from one to three thousand maunds, are probedwith test-rods, and the samples are treated just like thesamples of the challans, 5
everybody writing everything in duplicate and signingit. Having secured the mean consistence of each vat, therequisite quantity of each blend is weighed out, throwninto an alligating vat, of 250 maunds, and worked up bythe feet of coolies. This completes the working of the opium. It is nowready to be made into cakes after a final assay. Man hasdone nothing to improve it since it streaked the capsuleof the poppy—this mysterious drug. April, May, andJune are the months for receiving and manufacturingopium, and in the winter months come the packing andthe despatch. At the beginning of the cold weather Ghazipur holds,locked up, a trifle, say, of three and a half millionssterling in opium. Now, there may be only a paltrythree-quarters of a million on hand, and that is going outat the rate per 6
diem of one Viceroy’s salary for two and a half years.There are ranges and ranges of gigantic godowns, hugebarns that can hold over half a million pounds’ worth ofopium. There are acres of bricked floor, regiments onregiments of chests; and yet more godowns and moregodowns. The heart of the whole is the laboratory,which is full of the sick faint smell of an opium jointwhere they sell chandu. This makes Ghazipur indignant.‘That’s the smell of pure opium. We don’t need chanduhere. You don’t know what real opium smells like.Chandu-khana indeed! That’s refined opium undertreatment for morphia, and cocaine, and perhapsnarcotine.’ ‘Very well, let’s see some of the real opiummade for the China market.’ ‘We shan’t be making anyfor another six weeks at earliest; but we can show youone cake made, and you must imagine two hundred andfifty men making ’em as hard as they can—one everyfour minutes.’7
A Sirdar of cake-makers is called, and appears with aminiature wash-board, on which he sets a little squarebox of dark wood, a tin cup, an earthen bowl, and amass of poppy-petal cakes. A larger earthen bowl holdswhat looks like bad Cape tobacco. ‘What’s that?’ Trash—dried poppy-leaves, not petals, broken up andused for packing the cakes in. You’ll see presently.’ Thecake-maker sits down and receives a lump of opium,weighed out, of one seer seven chittacks and a half,neither more nor less. ‘That’s pure opium of seventyconsistence.’ Every allowance is weighed. ‘What are they weighing that brown water for?’ 8
‘That’s lewa—thin opium at fifty consistence. It’s thepaste. He gets four chittacks and a half of it.’ ‘And dothey weigh the petal-cakes?’ ‘Of course.’ The Sirdartakes a brass hemispherical cup and wets it with a rag.Then he tears a petal-cake, which resembles a pancake,across so that it fits into the cup without a wrinkle, andpastes it with the thin opium, the lewa. After this hisactions become incomprehensible, but there is evidentlya deep method in them. Pancake after pancake is tornacross, dressed with lewa, and pressed down into thecup; the fringes hanging over the edge of the bowl. Hetakes half-pancakes and fixes them skilfully, pickingnow first-class and now second--class ones, for there arethree kinds of them. Everything is gummed on toeverything else with the lewa, and he presses all downby twisting his wrists inside the bowl till the bowl islined half an inch deep with them, and they all glistenwith the greasy lewa. He now takes up an ungummedpancake and fits 9
it carefully all round. The opium is dropped tenderlyupon this, and a curious washing motion of the handfollows. The mass of opium is drawn up into a cone as,one by one, the Sirdar picks up the overlapping portionsof the cakes that hung outside the bowl and plastersthem against the drug for an outside coat. He tucks inthe top of the cone with his thumbs, brings the fringe ofcake over to close the opening, and pastes fresh leavesupon all. The cone has now taken a spherical shape, andhe gives it the finishing touch by gumming a largechupatti, one of the ‘moon’ kind, set aside from the first,on the top, so deftly that no wrinkle is visible. The cakeis now complete, and all the Celestials of the MiddleKingdom shall not be able to disprove that it weighs twoseers one and three-quarter chittacks, with a play of halfa chittack for the personal equation. The Sirdar takes it up and rubs it in the bran-10
like poppy trash of the big bowl, so that two-thirds of itare powdered with the trash and one-third is fair andshiny poppy-petal. ‘That is the difference between aGhazipur and a Patna cake. Our cakes have always anunpowdered head. The Patna ones are rolled in trash allover. You can tell them anywhere by that mark. Nowwe’ll cut this one open and you can see how a sectionlooks.’ One half of an inch, as nearly as may be, is thethickness of the shell all round the cake, and even in thisshort time so firmly has the lewa set that any attempt atsundering the skin is followed by the rending of thepoppy-petals that compose the chupatti. ‘Now you’veseen in detail what a cake is made of—that is to say,pure opium 70 consistence, poppy-petal pancakes, lewaof 52.50 consistence, and a powdering of poppy trash.’ ‘But why are you so particular about the shell?’ 11
‘Because of the China market. The Chinaman likesevery inch of the stuff we send him, and uses it. Heboils the shell and gets out every grain of the lewa usedto gum it together. He smokes that after he has dried it.Roughly speaking, the value of the cake we’ve just cutopen is two pound ten. All the time it is in our hands wehave to look after it and check it, and treat it as though itwere gold. It mustn’t have too much moisture in it, or itwill swell and crack, and if it is too dry John Chinamanwon’t have it. He values his opium for qualities just theopposite of those in Smyrna opium. Smyrna opiumgives as much as ten per cent of morphia, and if nearlysolid—90 consistence. Our opium does not give morethan three or three and a half per cent of morphia on theaverage, and, as you know, it is only 70, or in Patna 75,consistence. That is the drug the Chinaman likes. Hecan get the maximum extract out of it by soaking it inhot water, and he likes the flavour. He knows it 12
is absolutely pure too, and it comes to him in goodcondition.’ ‘But has nobody found out any patent way of makingthese cakes and putting skins on them by machinery?’ ‘Not yet. Poppy to poppy. There’s nothing better. Hereare a couple of cakes made in 1849, when they triedexperiments in wrapping them in paper and cloth. Youcan see that they are beautifully wrapped and sewn likecricket balls, but it would take about half an hour tomake one cake, and we could not be sure of keeping thearoma in them. There is nothing like poppy plant forpoppy drug.’ And. this is the way the drug, which yields such asplendid income to the Indian Government, is prepared. 13
Rudyard KiplingIn an Opium FactoryPrinted 16th April 1888 in The Pioneer and17th April 1888 in The Pioneer Mail. Kipling visited an opium factory in January 1888, on hisrail journey from Allahabad to Calcutta, shortly beforethe start of the spring opium production season. AndrewLycett notes in his biography of Rudyard Kipling,Chapter VII, Allahabad and Home (1887-1889), thatKipling visited Harry Rivett-Carnac here. He was an oldfriend of the Kipling family and had secured theposition of Opium Agent at Ghazipur on a salary of3,000 rupees a month: equivalent to Pounds Sterling2,700 per annum then, and five times as much asKipling’s salary in 1888. This reflected the highlyprofitable nature of the tradeBackground14
Kipling had used opium, both as a recreational drugand a medicine— to ease the constant diarrhea whichplagued Europeans in India; See Andrew Lycett,(above) pp. 96-7. See also The Gate of the HundredSorrows in Plain Tales from the Hills. The visit toCalcutta is described in The City of Dreadful Night . Opium is still produced in India under carefulgovernment control as a raw material forpharmaceuticals. Ghazipur remains the world’s largestOpium Factory. Ghazipur or Ghazipore, lies along the Gangesdownstream from Benares—now Varanasi. challans [1] — (see note immediately below) a challanis a maximum of 100 containers of opium. The termwas still in use in 2001 for 100 modern plasticNotes and Glossary15
HDPE (High Density Poly Ethylene) containers eachholding 35 kg of opium. challan [2] is also a word for a form such as a bank slip or paying-in slip or a parking ticket. From the amountof form-filling at Ghazipur described by Kipling in hisarticle, there could be a linguistic link between thechallan container and the forms used to record itshistory - meaning multifarious or manifold. chit or chitty — signed note or receipt, especially forfood and drink in a British club (origin: British, 1775–85; short for chitty < Hindi chiṭṭī letter or note, fromSanskrit chitra — a word with multiple senses includingwhite or blank or the colour of moonlight) maund — this weight varied so much in India andother parts of Asia, that it was standardised for India at82 2/7 lbs avoirdupois, equivalent to 37.32 kg. (Hobson-Jobson) 16
purkhea — a native expert in assessing the purity ofopium. one hundred grains— a 'grain' is a measure of 'troyweight'. There were 7000 grains to one poundavoirdupois, and therefore 100 grains was equivalent to0.0143 lbs or 6.48 grams. chandu or chandoo — Opium. See also The City ofDreadful Night, and The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows. chandu-khana —opium house or opium den, wherepatrons could go to smoke the drug. See The Gate of theHundred Sorrows in Plain Tales from the Hills. Sirdar —a commander – in this context, an overseer ofworkmen or foreman.17
Cape tobacco — black tobacco from South Africa. chittack — Hobson-Jobson gives the table of Indianweights as being: one maund = 40 ser (or seer) one ser = 16 chittacks chupatti or chapatti — a thin pancake of unleavenedbread. However, the reference here is to part of theopium petal cake that has the appearance of a chapatti. Celestials of the Middle Kingdom — racist term forChinese people, along with John or Jonnie Chinaman;note also coolie—a hireling two seers one and three-quarter chittacks, with a play ofhalf a chittack—1.968 kg plus or minus 0.029 kg. Patna — a city on the Ganges, downstream 18
from Ghazipur; the second largest city in eastern Indiaafter Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). Smyrna — a trading city in Turkey on the westernMediterranean coast – now known as Izmir – populatedin Kipling’s time largely by Greeks, Jews, andArmenians. Reputedly the city of Homer. Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January1936) was born in Mumbai (Bombay). Mother of Cities to me,For I was born in her gate,Between the palms and the sea,Where the world-end steamers wait. His father, Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and potterydesigner, was the principal and professor 20Biographical and Literary Notes
of architectural sculpture at the newly-founded SirJamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and Industry inBombay. Portuguese traders acquired the islands of Bombayfrom the Mughal Emperor in 1535. The city and islandspassed to the British, along with Tangiers, whenCatherine de Braganza married King Charles II in 1661.Bombay was then leased to the British East IndiaCompany in 1668. The British were not newcomers tothe city when Kipling was born. Bombay had an intellectual life based on the LiterarySociety of Bombay, founded in 1804, (renamed TheAsiatic Society of Mumbai in 2002). Kipling’s article Inan Opium Factory is a piece of journalism in the oldsense of a daily record of events and experiences.Moreover, it is a form of journalism that was promotedby informal philosophical societies—a model for 21
which was the Lunar Society of Birmingham. In AnOpium Factory is an example of study-tour journalism,which might be worthy of feature in The Society’stransactions. As such, it is a piece of technical writing in which thewriter displays skilful observation coupled with a loveof words and virtuosity in stringing them together.Kipling may have disavowed the article because he feltit to be too detailed and potentially dull for the generalreader. However, there is a more specific reason fordisowning the piece: the reason being that it is not onlytechnically detailed but also technically subversive. For a young author to make a name for himself and gainthe attention of a readership, it is no doubt necessary tobe somewhat critical of complacencies, and a littleflashy in tone, and to advance opinions that mightoffend some readers.22
When comment goes beyond constructive criticism,and becomes condemnation of the established order,then the writer risks rocking influential boats. Kiplingwanted to advance in the established order, not tooverthrow it. The article In an Opium Factory is an attack on theprivy purse of Empire and the unequal power politics ofthe Opium Wars—which prompted the TaipingRebellion of 1850. The date is prefigured in the lastparagraph of the article: Here are a couple of cakes made in 1849, ... You cansee that they are beautifully wrapped and sewn likecricket balls, … This is a young Kipling simile—worldly and knowingand wicked. He liked to suggest that he’d knocked abouta bit. Cakes and decorative wrapping and cricket balls… how harmless and 23
affectionate and fun — and ironic. It is the Great Gameof Empire, playing with friendly fire — and the fuel ofthe fire is money and trade. And this is the way the drug, which yields such asplendid income to the Indian Government, isprepared. 24
25British IndiaThis is the world of Rudyard Kipling's India. He published his finest novel Kim in 1901 and receivedthe Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.
Originally published in 1886 and revised in 1903, this isthe full Gutenberg text:https://www.gutenberg.org/files/58529/58529-h/58529-h.htmIn the 20th century, it came to be regarded as a work ofcolonial condescension; but it is now considered as anhistorical curiosity.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_RajFor readers who are interested in a more detailedaccount of British India, Wikipedia provides a briefarticle here:Hobson-Jobsonhttps://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/hobsonjobson/A Glossary of Common Anglo-Indian TerminologyThe University of Chicago provides a ready referencehttps://www.sansap.com/