Over the course of the nineteenth century, as Asia and Africa had fallen before Western science and industry, theorists of the European empires had sought convincing explanations for their supremacy, fixing the world into racial types distinguished by immutable characteristics – with the whites clearly at the top, and the ‘yellows’ and ‘blacks’ below. The conspicuous popularity of the drug amongst the Chinese became a symptom of the moral weakness and torpor of this alien, inexplicable race.
