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Opium Warehouses, 1851

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 219

In general, when looking at these two images we know that we are looking at ALOT of something; when that “something” is opium, it just seems like a whole lot more.  And this whole lot more is exactly that, drawn by Walter S. Sherwill (a Bengal Army Revenue Surveyor, 1815-1890, and published by The Scientific American on 29 July 1882)–these are the warehouses at the Patna opium factory in Bengal as they were in 1851. (The original drawings were published as Illustrations of the Mode of Preparing the Indian 
Opium Intended for the Chinese Market,
published by J. Madden in London.)  And that would be the government-controlled warehouses for the state crop, showing some of the 12,000,000 pounds of “poppy juice”  produced yearly in that district, this part intended for the captive Chinese audience, which brought to that country war(s), peonage, a ruined economy and  vast addiction.                                                                                          
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