Carol Benedict. Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011.
Tobacco use has long been a conspicuous feature of Chinese culture. This book is the first systematic scholarly study in English to address the history of this common everyday practice. It documents the many different routes through which New World tobacco initially arrived in China in the sixteenth century. It follows the spread of commercialized tobacco cultivation throughout much of China in the seventeenth century, changing fashions of tobacco use in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the emergence of the Chinese cigarette industry in the twentieth century. It explains why smoking, previously enjoyed by men and women alike, became almost exclusively a male habit after 1900. The book also examines traditional Chinese medical ideas about tobacco. The perception that smoking could be good for health together with the important role it played in building and maintaining social relationships go a long way towards explaining its ubiquity in Chinese society down to the present.
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