At the turn of the 20th century, tobacco baron James Duke told colleagues to bring him a world atlas. Flicking through it, he stopped when he saw a population figure of 430 million, jabbed his finger at a map of China and announced: 'That is where we are going to sell cigarettes.'
One hundred years on, Duke's prophecy about the potential appetite for cigarettes on the mainland, where the population has since grown to 1.3 billion, has been realised on a literally breathtaking scale.
According to a new global study of smoking trends, three out of every 10 cigarettes sold globally are smoked on the mainland. Cigarette production there increased seven-fold between 1960 and 2003, from 225 billion a year to 1.8 trillion - and 97 out of every 100 of those cigarettes are smoked within the country.
More than 300 million mainland men are smokers - more than the population of Duke's home country, the US. Out of every 100 men, 67 smoke, a higher percentage than anywhere else in the world apart from Yemen and Djibouti.
According to Judith Mackay, Hong Kong-based senior policy adviser to the World Health Organisation and co-author of the second edition of the Tobacco Atlas, it was the obsession of Duke and his contemporaries that sowed the seeds for what she sees as the mainland's current smoking epidemic.
'The leaders of the tobacco industry have had their eyes on China for more than 100 years and they are not taking them off,' she said. 'Duke was interested in China, and rightly so, because he could see the population numbers. That interest in China has simply never flagged.'
What Duke could not have predicted was how, while his company British American Tobacco gave the Chinese a taste for cigarettes in the early 20th century, the industry would be swallowed up by the state-owned Honghe, which now ranks as the fourth biggest-selling cigarette brand in the world.
