Vermeer's Hat: The seventeenth century and the dawn of the global world by Timothy Brook

Author:Timothy Brook
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2010-07-09T03:00:00+00:00

Another way of mitigating the heat of tobacco was to cool the smoke by passing it through that most yin of substances, water—hence the appeal of the water pipe, or hookah. Unlike in the Ottoman world, where it was first developed, the water pipe in China was reserved exclusively for women. In fact, a finely crafted water pipe became the sign of an elegant female. By the nineteenth century, no woman of style would deign to puff on a plain-stemmed pipe. Pipes were strictly for men and the lower classes. The same fashion mechanism went into effect when factory-made cigarettes arrived at the beginning of the twentieth century and pursued their long-drawn-out battle against pipes. A man might take them up, but a woman who smoked a cigarette was being risqué. By the 1920s, however, a female urban sophisticate would not be caught dead smoking a pipe. That was for the old hags back in the villages.

Just as women fit tobacco into their lives in ways that suited their habits, so too did men. Gentlemen were particularly concerned to conform their smoking to the requirements of the socially elegant life. Addicted to tobacco, they wanted it to be seen as part of what made a gentleman a gentleman and not a commoner. Given that everyone already smoked, it was not immediately obvious how this should be done. But gradually a set of customs was developed to give smoking the patina of distinctive refinement. To start with, one had to buy the more expensive brands of tobacco, since price was assumed to discriminate the connoisseur from the mere consumer. Yet that was not enough of a barrier between elite and common, since anyone with enough money but no taste could still enter the charmed circle on this basis. There had to be rituals around these activities that distinguished the elegant gentleman from the rich boor. Gentlemen had to practice their indulgence of tobacco differently from ordinary people.

One way in which they construed their taste for tobacco differently was to treat the compulsion to smoke as a sign of the true gentleman. Elegant men, declared one elite commentator, “cannot do without it however briefly, and to the end of their lives never tire of it.” Addiction was not a physical shortcoming, as we like to interpret it, but the sign of a passionate mind. A gentleman did not smoke just because he liked to; everyone liked to smoke. He did so because his sensitive nature turned him into a yanke, “tobacco’s guest” or “tobacco’s bondservant.” The refined gentleman experienced the desire to smoke as an estimable compulsion, something that his pure nature could not allow him to do without. It seems to us like an elevated way of explaining nicotine addiction before that concept was available; but for the Chinese elite it was more than that. It was a marker of social status deeply embedded in the particular cultural norms of late-imperial China.

Around this sense of compulsion grew up an elite culture of smoking, in praise of which the poets were enlisted.

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