Opium addiction in China

Opium addiction in China is presented as a widespread affliction that crosses social classes and leaves its users physically dependent on the drug. The novel gives this account a concrete setting in a Hong Kong smoking-house, where the spectacle of unconscious customers makes the costs of addiction visible even as the narrator frames them in strongly moralizing terms.

The Smoking-House

Fix brings Passepartout into a tavern on the quay, where they find a large room with customers drinking beer, porter, gin, and brandy while smoking long red clay pipes filled with opium mixed with rose essence. Some thirty people sit at small tables. When a smoker succumbs to the narcotic and slips beneath a table, waiters carry him by the head and feet to a large, cushioned camp-bed. That bed already holds twenty people in a deep stupor. The scene turns the narrator’s broad account of addiction into a visible routine: intoxication, collapse, and removal from the floor to a shared place of incapacitation.

Spread and Bodily Costs

The narrator describes opium as a drug sold annually by English merchants in quantities of 1.4 million pounds, and says that its use spread from the rich, for whom it was initially reserved, to lower social classes. The account emphasizes the scale and persistence of the practice, claiming that opium is smoked everywhere and at all times by men and women in China. It also presents dependence as difficult to break: users who try to stop suffer severe bodily contortions and agony. The narrator gives a particularly stark measure of heavy use, saying that a great smoker may consume as many as eight pipes a day and die within five years. These figures and generalizations belong to the novel’s account; the passage does not independently establish their historical accuracy.

Narrative Function and Framing

The smoking-house episode also serves the immediate plot. Fix has decided to tell Passepartout the truth in the hope of keeping Phileas Fogg in Hong Kong for several days. He invites Passepartout in, watches him closely as they drink two bottles of port, and finds him cheerful about Fix continuing the journey with them. Passepartout then rises to inform his master that the Carnatic will sail that evening rather than the next morning. Addiction is thus introduced not through a detached discussion but through an encounter that doubles as the setting for Fix’s attempted manipulation. The narrator’s denunciation of the drug and its sellers gives the episode a polemical edge, while the crowded bed and the waiters’ practiced handling of collapsed smokers supply its most concrete evidence of harm.