The British, as is well known, forced heroin upon the Chinese. The foreign powers also peddled tobacco, which some would say is more lethal. A browse through Chinese antique shops turns up old advertisements showing how western tobacco companies began exploiting the Chinese market long before their current obsession with the developing world.
I recently found an old poster in a Beijing curio shop portraying two pretty Chinese girls ecstatically puffing (untipped) Hatamen cigarettes, manufactured by the British Cigarette Company Ltd.
It is easy to find bundles of 1930s cigarette cards in street markets in port cities like Tianjin, with Chinese prints advertising other long-forgotten brands, such as Pirate, Peacock, China and Pin Head.
This all contributed to a cigarette-smoking culture in China, which was encouraged by the example of Communist Party leaders after liberation in 1949. Deng Xiaoping, who died in February after a stroke, was a chainsmoker.
During the paramount leader's famous meeting with Margaret Thatcher in the Great Hall of the People in 1982 he forced the then-British prime minister to become a passive smoker for over two hours.
Smoking became an almost indispensable part of doing business at every level in China, where personal relationships are so important. The first thing a villager will do when a stranger enters the house is to offer a cigarette. City officials believe an exchange of cigarettes can transform the atmosphere at a business meeting, whatever it does to the immediate biosphere.
People smoke almost everywhere, in restaurants, in the street, even in lifts. Old men drag on the weed when playing mahjong, construction workers dangle fags from their mouths as they climb scaffolding, young women blow smoke at their clients in karaoke bars.
The modern version of the cigarette card in today's market-oriented China is the Marlboro Man billboards along the country's highways. The big tobacco companies perceive Asia as a lucrative market, especially as antismoking campaigns and legal actions shrivel their profits in the west. They have moved into China in a big way.
A nationwide survey in 1996 revealed a three-fold increase in cigarette consumption since the "opening-up" policy began 20 years ago. Not only are more people smoking, but they are lighting up more often, averaging 15 cigarettes a day compared to 13 a day in the mid-1980s.
Today, seven out of 10 Chinese men are smokers. With 300 million smokers, the country has become the largest cigarette consumer and producer in the world, with one-tenth of arable land given over to tobacco-production.
This has led to the astonishing situation where three out of every 10 cigarettes smoked in the world today are smoked in China. Given what we know now about the effects of smoking on health, this means an epidemic of disease and death on a massive scale.
Prof Judith Mackay of Hong Kong, the executive director of the Asian Consultancy on Tobacco Control, claims that there are more than 500,000 smoking deaths in China every year. She believes the epidemic is increasing in Asia even faster than expected, mainly because the tobacco companies are specifically targeting women and young people.
So far only one in 25 Chinese women smoke. The potential for increasing sales and profits is enormous.
For all these reasons the 10th World Conference on Tobacco and Health is being held in China this year for the first time. It opened in Beijing yesterday with the theme "Tobacco, the growing epidemic" and has attracted 1,500 of the world's experts on smoking and health.
Prof Lu Rushan, the conference secretary-general, said that China "faces a catastrophe in the coming decades unless we can reverse the inexorable rise in cigarette sales". It has already overtaken Russia and the United Staes in smoking deaths. According to a paper to be presented at the conference by experts from two Chinese academies and Oxford and Cornell Universities, tobacco will eventually cause about two million deaths a year in China (when the children of today reach middle age) if current patterns persist.
A fightback against the habit is now under way in China as the toll becomes clear, not just in human but financial terms. The Chinese Association on Smoking and Health, in a submission to the conference, claims that health-related losses amount to 65 billion yuan (£5.5 billion) a year compared to revenues of 41 billion yuan (£3.5 billion).
An anti-smoking campaign is gathering momentum, and more than 70 cities have passed regulations against smoking in public places. Ten have won the title of "Tobacco Advertising-free City". There are now 1,000 smoke-free schools in Beijing, and Chinese children's radio programmes broadcast segments such as "Establishing healthy and comfortable family without smoker".
The austere post-Deng brand of senior Chinese politician is strongly anti-smoking. Tiananmen Square has been designated the largest outdoor smoke-free zone in the world. The Prime Minister, Mr Li Peng, is said to have once berated legislators for filling a room with second-hand fumes, and started a trend in smoke-free party meetings.
President Jiang Zemin himself presided over the opening of the conference yesterday, followed by perhaps the first totally smoke-free banquet in China, in the same Great Hall of the People where Deng Xiaoping blew smoke around Margaret Thatcher.
The paramount leader's thoughts still serve as a guide to his successor these days, but not as far as smoking is concerned.