Where would British literature be without opium?

Somehow, he was allowed to teach his online lesson for Primary Two pupils at Ho Lap Primary School in Tsz Wan Shan. Pro-establishment politicians are up in arms and the Education Bureau has promised to get to the bottom of it. The school has apologised.

This old sordid history doesn’t provoke in me, though, the same fervour as in many of my Chinese compatriots who often harbour worrying misconceptions as well. Reading about opium has made me understand the British better. They loved the drug as much as Chinese. This is not to excuse their highly destructive imperialistic trade in India and China; if anything, it makes them worse, only more human.

They liked to drink the stuff, in the form of laudanum, while Chinese preferred to smoke it. In Victorian England, you could buy it from your local chemist and barber. It was billed as a cure-all for all sorts of ailments, from headaches to depression and “women’s troubles”. Parents and nannies gave it to children to calm them or put them to sleep, in some cases, forever.

Name a famous 19th century British writer and he or she had probably used the drug, if not been an addict: Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Browning, Carlyle, Coleridge, Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde. I don’t know if the Bronte sisters were into the drug, but their brother Branwell was definitely an addict.

Of course, nothing beats Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. His loving descriptions of the drug’s effects make you want to try it as something on your bucket list. To me, it will always remain the single greatest piece of drug literature. It’s better than Aldous Huxley’s Heaven and Hell and The Doors of Perception, mostly on mescaline, and the more recent classic Breaking Open the Head, by Daniel Pinchbeck, on psilocybin. Its literary achievements are only rivalled by some drug-induced passages in Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell and Le Bateau ivre, and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal.