In the mid-19th century, although officially part of British North America, British Columbia was a wilderness territory, effectively run by the Hudson’s Bay Company which controlled the fur trade throughout the Pacific North-west. The area was largely unsettled and the sparse population was made up primarily of aboriginal people, and a few hundred British settlers and trappers. But early in 1858, within a few months of the discovery of gold in the Frazer River Valley, hopeful prospectors began to flood into the area, swelling the population of the colony to twenty or thirty thousand, many arriving directly from the California gold fields. By the following summer, the population of Victoria on Vancouver Island was about 3000 and it continued to grow, fuelled mostly by immigration from California.

One of the first Chinese merchants in Victoria, Cheong Lee (see case study box, below), arrived from San Francisco in the spring of 1858. He established the Kwong Lee Company on Cormorant Street, supplying Chinese gold seekers with a complete range of food and goods. By 1862, the Kwong Lee Company was second only to the Hudson’s Bay Company in the city and had branches in many of the gold-mining towns of the colony. And in much the same way as Kwong Lee had brought rice, chopsticks and joss paper to British Columbia, it also brought opium.

The Opium Wars
Ironically, opium had come to China itself in the early 19th century, when the British began to auction opium grown on poppy plantations in India by the East India Company to independent traders in the Chinese port of Canton. During the 17th and 18th centuries, Britain’s demand for silk, fine porcelain and tea from China had resulted in large outlays of British silver since, largely self-sufficient, China needed nothing from the West in return. But as Chinese demand for opium grew, the outflow of British silver was finally reversed.

At the beginning of the 19th century, only about 200 chests of opium were imported into China annually, but by 1820, as many as 17,000 chests of opium were imported as opium addiction spread among the Chinese. In 1839, in an attempt to shut down the growing opium trade, the Emperor of the Qing Dynasty ordered that £3 million of opium stock in Canton be seized and destroyed and he then closed the port to all foreign traders. In response, the British retaliated, attacking the Chinese with their superior navy, beginning what became known as the First Opium War. A Second Opium War followed in 1856. In the aftermath of the wars, Hong Kong was ceded to the British and, in 1860, China signed a treaty legalising the opium trade, setting the stage for the introduction of opium to British North America.

“Smokers while asleep are like corpses, lean and haggard as demons. Opium-smoking throws whole families into ruin, dissipates every kind of property, and ruins man himself”

From The Land and the People of China by J. Thomson, F.R.G.S.

From Hong Kong to Victoria
Once opium became legal in China, it was rapidly established as a trading commodity. As well as importing it, the Chinese began exporting both raw and refined opium from the now-British colony of Hong Kong into the port of Victoria in British Columbia. Of the population of Vancouver Island, by then about 4,460 residents, over a third of them were Chinese, newly arrived from California. The local newspapers predicted “Chinese are expected in droves” and indeed, that spring, the first ships with Chinese immigrants arrived in Victoria, creating the market for opium imported from Hong Kong.

Situated in the Victoria Chinatown neighbourhood referred to as the Forbidden City, the Kwong Lee Company’s opium factory in Fan Tan Alley was soon in competition with several other opium importers. By 1884 there were six factories in Victoria and by 1887, the number of opium factories in Victoria had grown to 13 and still the demand for opium in Canada increased.

Nation of opium addicts
Throughout the late 19th century, opium use spread from Victoria eastwards across the newly formed Dominion of Canada over the equally new Canadian Pacific Railway. In 1875, a report on the use and abuse of opium appeared in the Toronto-based Globe and Mail newspaper and stated that a total of 400,000 pounds of opium had been imported the previous year, indicating that as many as 100,000 opium addicts were being supplied. Although the newspapers focused on opium addiction among the Chinese immigrants, the number of addicts was far more than the people of Chinese descent recorded in the 1881 census. It was clear that Canadians of many ethnicities were becoming addicted to the drug all across the country.

In the 1890s, the Lakehurst Sanatorium in Oakville, Ontario published a leaflet entitled ‘A Popular Treatise on Drunkenness and the Opium Habit and their Successful Treatment’ to promote their revolutionary new cure of ‘double chloride of gold’. According to the leaflet, opium or morphine use had “grown to a fearful extent during the past few years” and its victims were to be found “in every city, village and hamlet”. Many with the opium habit were said to have become addicted after taking the drug to relieve pain and subsequently finding themselves unable to give it up. In sanitariums and treatment centres such as Lakehurst, opium addicts lined up for a series of four daily injections over the course of three weeks of the double chloride of gold cure, the contents of which were secret and a 95% cure rate was claimed. Eventually the treatment was exposed as a hoax and by 1905 the secret formula was revealed and shown to include morphine, cocaine, alcohol and cannabis.

When the deputy minister of labour, William Lyon Mackenzie King, came to Vancouver in 1908, he found thriving opium factories. Contrary to prevalent public opinion, he found many whites consuming the drug in great quantities as well as the Chinese. Government intervention was required and King wrote a report titled ‘The Need for the Suppression of the Opium Traffic in Canada’. Less than a month later, Bill 205 was passed through the House of Commons with little debate and given Royal Assent on July 20, 1908. The Act prohibited importation of opium without authorisation from the Minister of Customs and the manufacture, sale or possession of opium for the purpose of selling it was prohibited in Canada. The opium factories of Victoria were finally shut down.