中國産アヘンの販賣市場(1870年代～1906年)

Abstract

Previous research on opium in late Qing China has mainly focused on imported opium, this paper discusses China's native opium market of this period. China's native opium was produced in interior regions and sold much to the coastal regions. Because of China's vast area, internal trade was far more important than external trade. Since the Maritime Customs has left behind more complete sources on external trade, research on external trade are far more abundant than those on internal trade. From the scattered but numerous materials, this paper sketches a picture of one internal trade of such a large economy as traditional China. In China's native opium market, provinces with shortages in opium supply also had exports, provinces with surpluses also had imports, inter-provincial and even nationwide circulation was extremely common, and every opium production region responded keenly to the state of opium production in distant areas. Water and land transport were both important in linking production regions with markets. Water transport costs less expensive than land transport, but made it easier for the government to collect taxes, so its costs were not necessarily lower than land transport. Since the opium that each province produced had different grades, lower quality opium tended to be marketed inter-provincially to poor regions or the poor in wealthy regions, and vice versa. The size of circulation networks of various grades of native opium was profoundly influenced by the amount of their production. But, the fact that middle- and low- grade Sichuan opium's nationwide circulation network was the largest could also be explained by the biggest share of poor people in the whole population. Apart from a small amount of native opium sold to Southeast Asia and Russia, China's native opium was mostly sold on the domestic market as China itself constitutes a big market for the lower grade opium. William G. Skinner believed that there was extremely little interaction between the nine regions he divided for China, because trade between each of the regions was limited by high-cost, unmechanized forms of transport and long distances. For the native opium discussed in this essay, because its unit price was high, its markets were not limited by high-cost unmechanized transport and long distances. Rhoads Murphy deemed that the treaty ports had little connection with interior China. In addition to pointing out their close relation, this paper also reveals many important distribution centers outside of the treaty ports for distributing native opium.