10
Extracted from the Dictionary of
PAPAVER
History of Opium-eating
somniferum.
HISTORY.
Post.
Capsules
Imported
into
India.
Chinese
Indulgence.
TANG
DYNASTY.
8th century
A. D.
632 A.D.
Early Culti-
vation in
Szechwan.
973 A.D .
are not scratched for their opium though that property is fully known.
Thus Mr. Baden Powell informs us that this is the case in Jálandhar where
the poppy is grown for its capsules which are used in making post, an in-
fusion consumed as a beverage. The post of the Panjáb appears to closely
resemble the kuknár which was a luxury among the Muhammadans in
the time of Akbar. Bontius, writing of Batavia in 1658, tells us that the
Indians were there divided popularly into two sections—those called pusti,
who smoke an inferior opium prepared from the leaves, stems, and the
capsules of the poppy, and those called afyuni who could afford to pur-
chase ordinary opium. Throughout India the seeds of the poppy are
cooked in various sweetmeats or are employed in the extraction of an oil
which is used for culinary and other purposes. It need not, therefore, be
a subject of much surprise that in the Persian, Arabic, and Indian lan-
guages there should exist names (some of which became like post or
pust) widely diffused, and which appear quite independent of Greek litera-
ture. Indeed, had the cultivation of the poppy proceeded exclusively from
the Greeks and diffused eastward, prior to the Aryan invasion of India,
the people of Egypt and Palestine might have been expected to have pos-
sessed an earlier knowledge of it than the Roman epoch. Far from this
being so, it can hardly be said to be mentioned in Hebrew literature, since
the Jerusalem Talmud (seventh century) is the earliest work that alludes to
ophyon--a poisonous drug--and Pliny in the first century is the earliest
author who refers to Egyptian opium. It seems, therefore, highly probable
that the merits of the poppy seed and poppy capsules were known to the
Arabs and to the people of large tracts of Central Asia and even of Upper
India anterior to the supposed Greek discovery of opium. But the silence
of the early Sanskrit authors leaves no room for doubt that right down to
the commencement of Muhammadan influence in India the various wild
poppies of the country attracted very little attention. We have no evidence
that Papaver somniferum ever existed in any part of India, Balúchistán,
Afghánistán, or even Persia, in a wild state, and even now, after at least a
thousand years of cultivation, it has nowhere manifested any tendency to
become naturalized. It thus seems likely that for many years the early
Arab traders brought by land and sea the capsules of the poppy just as
they carried them to China, and it need only be here added that long
after poppy cultivation had been started in India, the Arabs continued to
bring to this country Arabian opium in competition with that of Cambay.
CHINESE TRADE.—A Chinese writer (Ch'en Ts'ang-ch`i) of the eighth
century quotes Sung Yang-tzu as stating that the poppy has four petals.
It is white and red. Above is a pale red rim. This last expression
probably denotes the poppy often seen on the Himálaya with petals
white below but with a purple band on their extremities. Dr. Edkins in
his Historical Note on the Poppy in China comments on the above state-
ment that " at this time, the Arabs had been trading with China for at
least a century, for Mahomet's death occurred A.D. 632 and that of his
uncle" (an immigrant to China), not long afterwards. It was easy for
the poppy to be cultivated with the jasmine and the rose everywhere
throughout the country." -We know, indeed, from the Nan-fang ts'ao-mu-
chuang, a work which dates from the beginning of the fourth century, that
the jasmine and the henna plants, which must have come with the Arabian
commerce, were already in China when that book was written. Though
there are thus early indications of Arab influence in China, the first dis-
tinct mention of the poppy is in the work of Ch'ên Ts'ang-ch'i quoted
above. A poem written at the close of the T'ang dynasty shows that at
that time the poppy was cultivated at Ch'êng-tu-fu in Szechwan.
The Emperor Sung T'ai-tsu in 973 A.D. gave orders that the medi-