All the Tobacco in China

While traveling through China a couple of times, one thing that sticks out is the absolute mass of cigarette smokers. When I was young, there were no real smoking laws in America and people would light up whenever and wherever the desire struck. It has not been so in the States for over a decade. Travel through China and it will take you back to a more hazy and asthma filled time. This story from the Wall Street Journal I thought was funny and talks a bit about the issue. Can you imagine flying on an airplane with a "smoking" section? I did, sitting with my mom who at the time was a pack and a half day smoker.....yuck!

By HUGO RESTALL who writes in the Wall Street Journal

To all the other superlatives used to describe China we may now add the fact that it has the tastiest cigarettes. I don't pretend to be a connoisseur, having only begun smoking a couple weeks ago, but then again I've been inhaling the smoke of Chinese cigarettes for years.

The country consumes about one-third of the world's cigarettes. As a student, I often carried a pack just to offer to others. Want to start a conversation on a train in China? Shake the pack. Asking directions? Hold out a stick and say, "chou yi ger." If the guy is already smoking, he'll tuck it behind his ear for later.

After years of resisting, a friend in Shanghai gave me the perfect excuse to start smoking. China has become so polluted, he told me, that it's better to breathe through a cigarette filter than just take in the air on its own. And if your lungs are going to get shot to hell anyway, you might as well enjoy it. So, well into middle age, I figured that it was probably a good time to take up the smoking habit.

The result? I enjoy it so much that I don't know why I didn't take it up earlier.

For the Chinese, smoking carries connotations that might seem outdated, even quaint to Westerners. Real men smoke, period. And when real men hang out together, they smoke a lot. The presence of women is appreciated, of course -- if they are quick with a lighter. At a formal meal or banquet, each course may be followed by a cigarette, as if to cleanse the palate, and a few more cigarettes will be smoked at the end, in place of port. As the saying goes, fan hou yi zhi yan, sai guo huo shenxian -- a cigarette after a meal and you feel better than a living god.

Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping smoked like chimneys, even when they were meeting foreign dignitaries. The government provided its leaders with top-quality tobacco. The best cigarette brands, many manufactured in Shanghai on the equipment confiscated from the capitalists in 1949, conferred an aura of power. Limited production now helps them retain their cachet.

Mao reportedly favored a brand called Chunghwa, which means China. These cigarettes always came in a distinctive red packet, the color of the Forbidden City walls, embossed with the Gate of Heavenly Peace in gold, although without Mao's portrait. Perhaps, for Mao, it would have been too strange to see his own face smiling back at him from his cigarette box. Deng smoked the elusive Pandas, which had a campy, 1960s look to them -- psychedelic orange packaging and cartoon of pandas snacking on bamboo.

These brands are still around, of course. But puffing on the same lights as dead dictators doesn't come cheap. Chunghwas run you almost $10 a pack, and Pandas, if you can find them, are $12. But it's worth it. Not only do they offer a pungent sense of history, they taste fantastic. Both are exceptionally smooth, almost like an Indonesian kretek clove cigarette. But they kick like a Camel unfiltered.

Pandas are made with a dark tobacco and hence are woody and nutty, with hints of pine shavings and hickory. They are a bit strong, and have a very long filter to compensate. But they leave a spicy aftertaste, which perhaps is why Deng, who was from Sichuan, the land of chilies and peppercorns, loved them so much.

When you open a pack of Chunghwa cigarettes, you can smell the bouquet of preserved plums, and they convey a fruity flavor even when alight. If smoking puts you on the road to early death, as some spoilsports say, then Chunghwas make the journey an extremely pleasant one. I would go so far as so say that, if you ever find yourself in the unfortunate position of being offered a last cigarette, make it a Chunghwa. This is a smoke to be savored like a vintage wine.

Many of the scents of the old China are disappearing, like the smoke of the feng wo mei, charcoal powder pressed into the shape of a honeycomb that was once burned in most households for cooking and heat. But cigarettes, at least, remain. It used to be that, whenever a man exhaled off his cheap cigarette, it would transport me back to my student days and the "hard seat" train compartments where I would almost be asphyxiated by clouds of smoke. Now that man might be me.