There is no such thing as the Kangxi and Qianlong eras

Chapter 327 Tobacco and Commerce

It's already considered quite good that Jingzhou only managed to arrest a hundred people for opium use in half a month.

Hunan is the worst case. Hunan is close to Guangdong and Guangxi, and it happens to have a lot of mountains, making it perfect for growing poppies.

After the land was redistributed, many people in the towns and villages of southern Hunan were able to eat their fill, so they gradually converted their farmland, which could not grow much grain, into poppies, which had been introduced from Guangdong.

The common people had no idea of ​​the harm this thing could cause; they only knew that growing poppies was easy and that they could make money selling them to pharmacies.

Even when their own children have a cough, they can grind a small amount of poppy seeds into powder and soak them in water to treat the cough and save a lot of money on medical treatment and medicine.

Moreover, feeding chickens with poppy residue makes them grow fast and fat.

Nie Yu issued an imperial edict to Hunan, and all the poppies in the mountainous areas of southern Hunan were discovered. Upon receiving the news, Hunan Governor Feng Xiuyong immediately took charge of the operation and dispatched the Fourth Division to the south to suppress the unrest and prevent the people from obstructing the government's efforts to destroy the poppies in anger.

Within just half a month of the imperial decree being issued, officials at all levels in Hunan submitted memorials urging the authorities to stop it.

Hubei is too far from Fujian and Guangdong, so poppy cultivation hadn't spread there yet. Moreover, Hubei has the Jianghan Plain, and not enough mountainous land to grow such an "economic" crop as poppies.

But Hunan is different. Excluding the Dongting Lake Plain, more than half of Hunan is mountainous, so they managed to get poppies from Guangdong with great difficulty.

Some Hunan officials even used this as a foundation to plan a major undertaking to revitalize the economy of their jurisdiction.

As a result, the King of Han issued an edict that all poppies, whether planted by civilians or officials, must be destroyed within a specified period. Moreover, even if they were planted again in the future, they would be subject to heavy taxes, leaving no room for maneuver.

The officials who submitted memorials to dissuade the practice were mostly from mountainous prefectures and counties in southern Hunan. They couldn't understand why poppy cultivation was suddenly banned.
Nie Yu wasn't too angry when he received these memorials.

Ignorance is no excuse; it's all the fault of that old dog Qianlong, who deliberately condoned the cultivation and spread of opium, which allowed opium to expand and spread so rapidly in China.

Moreover, this is also due to the lack of awareness of opium in the current era. Even Chinese doctors who first came into contact with opium hastily believed that opium was a good medicine for curing diseases after seeing the medicinal value of a small amount of opium, and that the more you use, the better the effect.

In fact, even forty years later during the Opium War, the British had not yet realized the harmfulness of poppies; their justification for the war was that the barbaric Qing dynasty was hindering normal commercial activities.

Yes, the British, Dutch, and Portuguese all considered opioids to be normal drugs, and that smoking them could relax the mind and body.

From World War I to World War II, soldiers in these European countries still maintained the habit of taking drugs.

Later, Americans even considered the radioactive radium as a "high-energy" substance that could affect the human body, so they added it to beverages, cosmetics, children's snacks, and so on. They added radium to everything that could be eaten, drunk, or used to make a big sale!

This wasn't a setup by capitalists, because they themselves drink the "radium water" they produce to replenish their energy.

Nie Yu's unified reply to officials at all levels in Hunan was to go to the local prisons and see for himself how terrifying the withdrawal symptoms of those opium addicts really were.
In any case, the Han Dynasty has now fully mobilized, and it's not just the two provinces of Hubei and Hunan that are arresting people, but also the newly occupied territories of Jiangxi, Anhui, and Chongqing.

In order to save manpower for arrests, the Han army temporarily slowed down its offensive in Anhui. Of the 26,000 troops brought by Yang Fang, 20,000 were dispatched to patrol and search for opium poppies in the five prefectures of Anqing, Chizhou, Huizhou, Ningguo, and Taiping.

The southern Jiangxi and Sichuan provinces, which nominally submitted but were in reality separatist regimes, were also ordered by Nie Yu to completely ban the cultivation and spread of opium in their areas.

If it's not resolved within the deadline, then they don't need to resolve it.

The Han Dynasty will personally send troops to resolve the issue, including dealing with them.

Two months after the ban on poppies was issued, Nie Yu was reviewing the Ministry of Works' reform plan submitted by the cabinet. The poppy scandal was truly shocking; the number of addicts in Jingzhou alone had reached over a hundred, and the number in other areas was likely much higher.

The sight of these addicts gathered together, weeping and wailing, looking neither human nor ghost, truly terrified the officials of the various departments of the Han Dynasty's cabinet.

I never imagined that this tiny opium could be so toxic, that just a little bit could make someone addicted.

The predecessor of the Ministry of Works was the Department of Industry and Commerce. After the Department of Industry and Commerce was upgraded to the Ministry of Works, the original Department of Commerce was attached to the Ministry of Works.

But now it seems that the Ministry of Works still cannot manage the Merchants' Office. Of the more than one hundred drug addicts in Jingzhou alone, one-third of their opium came from merchants introduced by the Ministry of Works' Merchants' Office.

After discussion, the cabinet, including Minister of Works Yao Hongyi, all agreed that the Ministry of Works should no longer concurrently serve as the Ministry of Commerce.

The scope of business handled by the Commerce Bureau has expanded considerably since its inception, and one Commerce Bureau is clearly no longer sufficient. Moreover, if the Commerce Bureau continues to be affiliated with the Ministry of Works, it will disperse the Ministry of Works' officials, making the Ministry of Works busy while also effectively merging the two ministries, giving the Commerce Bureau more power than the other ministries.

After reviewing the document, Nie Yu agreed wholeheartedly and wrote a reply: "Approved. Order that, effective immediately, the Commerce Bureau be relocated and newly established as the Ministry of Commerce, in charge of important commercial matters within and outside the Great Han Dynasty."

He paused, then added, "The new Minister of Commerce is the former Vice Minister of Works, who was also the Chief of the Commerce Department, and has been transferred to the position of Left Vice Minister of Commerce."

After dealing with the issues of the Ministry of Works and the Ministry of Commerce, Nie Yu then picked up the memorial on legal reform submitted by the Ministry of Justice.

Although the Han Dynasty legal code referenced the Ming Dynasty Code and the Qing Dynasty Code, neither of them considered legislation to ban opium and tobacco.

This left the Han Dynasty with little recourse in dealing with opium and the merchants who cultivated and spread it.

This was definitely not going to work. After a month of discussion, the Ministry of Justice finally drafted detailed laws and regulations concerning opium.

Nie Yu glanced through it briefly and found it to be almost identical to that of later generations. He picked up his brush and wrote in vermilion ink: "Read. The criminal law is adequate, but its punishment is superfluous and insufficient to deter the greedy and avaricious!"

The implication is that the sentence given by the Ministry of Justice was too lenient.

It's one thing to not know about opium before, but now that its addictive nature is known, if it's not accompanied by severe penalties, many merchants might take the risk and actively sell opium poppies for huge profits.

With opium already decided to be banned, the cabinet is now asking whether tobacco should also be banned.

There's no way around it; tobacco can be smoked together with opium, and in fact, chronic opium use mainly relies on tobacco.

Moreover, tobacco and poppies are both crops that ordinary people can grow themselves. The cabinet believes that whether or not tobacco is banned, people should not be allowed to grow it freely in the future.

Nie Yu considered the matter carefully and replied, "Tobacco is not opium or poppy, so it doesn't need to be banned along with opium. However, the future cultivation and production of tobacco must be planned and managed by the government. People who want to grow tobacco must register with the government. Those who violate this rule and grow tobacco privately will be punished even more severely!"

Nie Yu doesn't smoke, neither in his past life nor this one, but tobacco can't be banned; banning it might backfire.

To give an interesting example, later generations of Americans once banned the sale of sugar and alcohol, and made them equally criminal offenses.

As a result, many American liquor dealers switched to selling sugar during this period. The subsequent surge in the power of sugar dealers in the United States coincided perfectly with the timeline of Prohibition.

(End of this chapter)