From today's perspective. the Chinese courtier’s ornate surrender to tobacco seems absurd. but it had many equally odd counterparts abroad. At the same time that Lu Yao was laying out smoking etiquette, wealthy English were taking snuff (finely ground tobacco stems) in public sessions heavy with ritual. Opening their silver or ivory fetish of the eighteenth century." as the anthropologist Berthold Laufer put it—fashionable young blades scooped out measures of fresh-ground snuff with finger-length ladles made of bone. Parties fell quiet as groups of men in embroidered waistcoats simultaneously inserted tiny pucks of ground tobacco into their noses, then whipped out lace to muffle the ensuing volley of sneezes. Mastering the arcana of snuff was, for the addict, worth the bother: snorted tobacco delivered nicotine to the bloodstream faster than cigarette smoke. Few were more enraptured by the ritual than the celebrated London dandy Beau Brummell. who claimed to have a different snuffbox for every day of the year. Brummell instructed his fellow gallants in the subtle alt of using only one hand to open the box, extract a pinch of snuff, and stick it in a nostril. The injection had to be accomplished with a rakish tilt of the head to avoid unsightly brown drips.

Snuff mania had few consequences in England other than interrupted party chatter, high laundry bills, and nasopharyngeal cancer. China's tobacco addiction occurred in an entirely different context, and thus had an entirely different impact. N. tabacum was part of an unplanned ecological invasion that shaped, for better and worse, modern China.

At the time, China had roughly a quarter of the world's population, had to provide for itself on roughly a twelfth of the world's arable land. Both figures are imprecise at best, but there is little dispute that the nation has long had a lot of people and that it always has had relatively little land to grow crops to feed them. In practical terms. China had to harvest huge amounts of food—half or more of the national diet—from areas with enough water to grow rice and wheat. Unluckily, those areas are relatively small. The nation has many deserts, few big lakes, irregular rainfall, and just major rivers, the Yangzi and the Huang He (Yellow). Both rivers run long, looping courses from the western mountains to the Pacific coast. emptying into the sea scarcely 150 miles from each other. The Yangzi carries mountain runoff into the lice-growing flats near the end of its course. The Huang He takes it into the North China Plain, then as now the center of Chinese wheat production. Both areas are vital to feeding the nation: there are no other places in China like them. And both are prone to catastrophic floods.

Song and Yuan. Ming and Qing—every dynasty understood both this vulnerability and the concomitant necessity of maintaining China's agricultural base by controlling the Yangzi and Huang He. So important was water management that European savants like Karl Marx and Max Weber identified it as China's most important institution. Cleating and operating huge. complex irrigation systems, Weber claimed required organizing masses of laborers, which inevitably Cleated a powerful state bureaucracy and subjugated the individual. In an influential book from 1957. the historian Karl Wittfogel built on Marx to describe China and places with similar water-control needs as "hydraulic societies." Wittfogel's view of these societies can be gathered from the title of his book: Oriental Despotism. Europe, to his mind, avoided despotism because farmers didn't need irrigation. They fended for themselves. which created traditions of individualism, entrepreneurship. and technological progress that China never had. In recent years this thesis has fallen out of favor. Most Sinologists today believe that hydraulic Asia was just as diverse, individualistic, and market oriented as anywhere else, including non-hydraulic Europe. But this image still remains influential, at least in the West, where China is all too often viewed as an undifferentiated mass of workers, moving ant-wise to the directives of the state.