Carol Benedict
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Carol Benedict‘s Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010 (University of California Press, 2011) is many things at the same time; among other things, it’s both an exceptionally rich account of an object (or set of objects) that were crucial to the history of China in the world, and an engaging journey through the history of modern China on the leaves and flowers and stalks of a plant. Benedict’s book traces the narrative of tobacco in China from early modern encounters to the “cigarette century” of today. In addition to situating Chinese history within a larger global framework, it is also very sensitive to the multi-sited and trans-regional story of tobacco within China, showing change and continuity across the late imperial/modern divide.
This is a work that is profoundly trans-disciplinary in scope, and as a result it rewards readers interested in any number of disciplines, including the histories of commodities, disease, China, modern literature, gender, global encounters, and trade.
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This is great; though I am a scholar of literature, I have worked on tobacco in relation to 20th century familiar essayists (“Smoking as a Socially Symbolic Act: Essays of the Analects (Lunyu) Group in the 1930s,” Symbolism: An International Journal of Critical Aesthetics vol. 11 (Dec. 2011)”). I’m going to make sure our library at UVa has your book! I’m anxious to see how she engages with Frank Dikotter’s suggestion in Narcotic Culture that, though tobacco use had a long history in China, part of the explosion of the cigarette in China was the interest of foreign tobacco countries in using tobacco to displace opium use, and that tobacco companies like ABT may have even played a role in demonizing opium. And one of my pet questions is what the significance of the depiction in popular culture of Ji Xiaolan (Ji Yun) as a heavy tobacco pipe smoker (like the early 2000s TV series “Tiechi tongya Ji Xiaolan”) while there doesn’t seem to be much of a historical basis for this depiction.