Opium References in Popular Culture, the 2022 List

Posted: December 27th, 2022 | No Comments »

I’ve been spotting opium references in popular culture with interest for quite a few years now (2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 & 2012) about just how opium keeps on fascinating us.

Let’s start with me! My new podcast this year, The Lady from Hong Kong, made with the South China Morning Post and RTHK3 in Hong Kong was all about opium smuggling from China to America in 1939. You can listen to all four episodes here.

And TV. The first episode of Series 2 of Vienna Blood – The Melancholy Countess – saw a Hungarian countess with a little bit of an opium problem. Opium also cropped up on the Victorian crime drama Miss Scarlet and the Duke (Alibi TV in the UK).

Some society wives in the French TV show Paris Police 1900 took to the needle for some opium injections too.

On the big screen opium among the Romantics appeared in Emily, the bio-pic of Emily Brontë that took a few liberties (the opium included).

And on to fiction…TL Mogford’s The Plant Hunter is a Victorian era romp that swings from London to China and Marco Polo’s footsteps with some opium and opium wars along the way.

And some non-fiction, primarily Peter Thilly’s The Opium Business….and Joseph Sassoon’s The Global Merchants, a history of the Sassoon clan, which also had numerous opium references obviously…

And…..opium on the stage!

Ballet Rambert’s Peaky Blinders ballet, Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby had a bunch of opium references…

Not to be outdone, China’s National Center For The Performing Arts and Guangzhou Drama Art Center staged the play Lin Zexu, about the man sent by the emperor to Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, to stop the illegal importation of opium from Britain in 1838.

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