Asian Opium Fields: The Origins of the Golden Triangle

The Golden Triangle is the drug center of Southeast Asia, located in the bordering mountains of Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar, and has been a main supplier of opium and heroin for more than two hundred years. Unseated in recent times by the production in Afghanistan and the gaining popularity of yaa baa, an amphetamine-type stimulant, around the ASEAN, the Golden Triangle still thrives despite stringent efforts to suppress production and export. But this is difficult: the mountains are hard to navigate and remain largely unchecked, making for an ideal hotbed of warlords and smugglers.

Merchants from the Afyon province in Turkey, sometime during the thirteenth or fourteenth century, brought opium to India and China, where what was originally known as a medicine soon became a recreational drug for its soothing properties. With the colonizing of India by the British and the arrival of the East India Trading Company in the seventeenth century, opium soon boomed as a commodity, and the profit went to the expansion of the British colonial empire. The only thing the Chinese wanted to trade with the British was silver for their tea. Silver supply dwindled, so Britain directed India to produce opium that soon became the currency for trade, and China’s silver soon went back to India to pay for opium. The prohibition laws in China in the early eighteenth century was largely ignored by the western traders, and when the British refused to sign a bond to stop importing opium to China, the government destroyed twenty thousand chests of opium seized from their warehouses. The British attacked until China surrendered and signed the Treaty of Nanjing, which cost them Hong Kong (only relinquished in 1997), exclusive trade rights, and the opening of opium trade in Chinese ports.

This all changed in the 1860s, when China began to grow massive amounts of opium. Ideal for opium poppy cultivation, the Yunnan area of China bordered British Burma (now independently Myanmar), French Indochina (now the country of Laos and northern Vietnam), and northern Thailand. This area is home to various native hill tribes of both Chinese and Southeast Asian Origin and became a refuge for the refugees fleeing the political instability of China at the start of the twentieth century. Opium then became a highly valuable cash crop for the inhabitants. Thus began an opium monopoly that became what is now known as the Golden Triangle.

Sources

 

Wikipedia. 2016. “Afyonkarahisar.” Last modified October 5. Accessed November 28, 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afyonkarahisar

Asian Pacific Media Services Limited. 2016. “The Golden Triangle Opium Trade: An Overview.” Last modified March 2000. Accessed October 28, 2016. http://www.asiapacificms.com/papers/pdf/gt_opium_trade.pdf

 

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