Theorising Belle Époque Rio de Janeiro through Opium: João do Rio’s “Visões d’ópio” as a Postcolonial Framework

Abstract

In 1905, Brazilian writer João do Rio published the crônica “Visões d’ópio” (Visions of opium), an account of his forays into the Chinese opium dens of Rio de Janeiro. While opium is often emblematic of both Parisian cosmopolitanism and exotic Orientalism in fin-de-siècle literature, I argue that the drug is less a replication of these coordinates in Brazil than a method of geopolitical thinking. Drawing from opium’s extractive history in China and its versatility as a material thing – plant, commodity, drug, alkaloid – I argue that opium as theory and praxis not only reconfigures the writer’s experience of Rio, but also makes stark the strategies behind and costs of Brazil’s colonial formation. While opium sustains a desire for modernity through its exotic and cosmopolitan imaginaries, its destabilising effects on the body disrupt fantasies of colonial amalgamation, exposing histories of extraction and racialised labour implicit in the drug’s circulation. Through an analysis that bridges empirical and new materialisms – and from a Chinese geographical axis that puts Brazil into a transnational dialogue beyond Europe – opium becomes a medium for thinking through Brazil’s colonial roots and its place in the world among other nation-states during a period of transition from empire to republic.

Keywords:

• Brazilian literature
• new materialism
• postcolonial studies
• China
• Brazil
• critical geographies
• modernity

In 1905 Brazilian writer João do Rio published in Rio de Janeiro’s Gazeta de Notícias a journalistic essay, or crônica, that he suggestively titled, “Visões d’ópio. Os chins do Rio” (Visions of opium: The chinamen of Rio).¹ The text opens in media res with a conversation on opium. As the narrator and an unnamed companion discuss the drug, they also furnish an imposing description of Rio’s geography, its sweeping vistas and its gritty margins, after which the narrative arc then follows the two men on a gripping foray into the opium dens of the city’s Misericórdia slums. Enticed by the prospect of seeing Chinese addicts in action, João do Rio and his guide pose as opium dealers to enter the fumeries. As the night grows, the two men venture deeper into the network of fumeries, where intoxicated rapture has taken on “infernal proportions,” until in the last of the dens they visit, the smell of opium forces the writer to double over with stomach cramps and the urge to vomit. Disoriented by the smell of opium, João do Rio sees himself transported to Tientsin and Singapore in a montage of precarious scenes until – utterly overwhelmed and undone by the experience of the drug – he buckles to the ground. Drawing from this vivid intersection of opium’s geographical imaginary and its material agency, I re-read João do Rio’s “Visões d’ópio” as a critical framework for thinking through Rio de Janeiro’s geopolitical positioning in the early twentieth century, as Brazil emerged from empire to renegotiate its place in the world.

As befits both the singularity of the crônica’s subject matter and its canonisation in João do Rio’s oeuvre as a part of the collection A alma encantadora das ruas (The enchanting soul of the streets, 1908), previous scholarship on “Visões d’ópio” generally falls into one of two broad categories: studies related to the Chinese in Brazil, or studies that speak to the issues of João do Rio’s milieu – drugs, crime, urbanisation, flaneur-ing, and the emergence of a sensationalist, popular literature – addressed by his oeuvre as a whole. While these references to “Visões d’ópio” circulate the crônica in public scholarship, their fragmentary citations of the text support broader arguments on Chinese immigration or João do Rio’s work as a whole, rather than providing a comprehensive analysis of the crônica. Both Jeffrey Lesser (1999, 39) and Boris Fausto (2009, 34n5) reference the crônica as a historical document (albeit a hyperbolic one) to attest to the existence of Chinese immigrants and their fumeries in the larger context of race and migration in Brazil. Other studies cite the crônica amongst other passages in João do Rio’s oeuvre to point out the tendencies of the literary period. Beatriz Resende (2006), for example, includes “Visões d’ópio” among a selection of crônicas on drugs from the era in the collection Cocaína: literatura e outros companheiros de ilusão (Cocaine: literature and other companions of illusion). Pedro Sasse’s (2017, 195-196) study on the ways the emerging literary genres of the period – be they hardboiled crime serials or fait divers – typified and exploited the burgeoning urban anxieties of the early twentieth century quotes from “Visões d’ópio” as an example of how João do Rio’s narration of the city’s margins from a first-hand view intensifies readers’ vicarious experience of urban horror. Marcela Croce (2018, 209-215) cites the text on opium in her comparison of Brazilian and Argentine urban writers of the early twentieth century, in particular João do Rio and Roberto Arlt (1904-1942), to typify the Brazilian journalist as a stylistic inheritor of Baudelaire on the one hand and a chronicler of Rio’s underworld on the other. An array of dissertations and theses have also demonstrated the enduring interest in this particular crônica, as well as the diverse range of questions that it inspires, but a comprehensive, literary close-reading of the text – especially one that bridges the peculiar role of opium in fin-de-siècle Rio and the drug’s relationship to its Chineseness – has yet to be undertaken.

Particular to my analysis of “Visões d’ópio”, and indeed the impetus for a reworked, closer reading of the crônica, is the peculiarity of opium as a material form. I argue that the drug’s unique material histories on the one hand and its singular material agency on the other fundamentally disrupts our understanding of how Brazilian writers of the Belle Époque conceived of Rio de Janeiro in particular and of Brazil’s place in the world at large. My re-interpretation throws opium into the foreground of the figure-ground relationship. The presence of opium in João do Rio’s work is not merely a Parisian imitation or evidence of Rio’s grime, but a material conduit that makes stark the city’s positioning in a broader network of inter-imperial geographies (i.e. not just European but also Asian) and pushes towards a rethinking of Rio’s own complex legacies of coloniality during a period fraught with rapid political shifts.

Chinese geographies, material oddities

As both a fetishised commodity that conceals histories of labour in the Marxist sense, and as a form of “vibrant matter” with, in the words of Jane Bennett (2010, viii), the “capacity (…) to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own”, opium is akin to, but also unlike any other substance of modernity like coffee, sugar, tobacco, or tea. Many scholars have not only characterised these stimulants as paradigmatic of modern life, but have also attributed to them a significant role in pushing forward trajectories of time (from the medieval to the modern) and geography (from the Old World to the New). Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1992, 13) proposes that “the modern era starts out in medieval guise with its quest for spices and for Paradise (…) spices lured the Old World into the New, where it lost its way”. Julio Ramos (2010, 60) as well, drawing from Fernando Ortiz (1987), observes, “[t]obacco stimulates the activity of Voltaire, like coffee, tea or chocolate, all of these commodities from the colonial world intervened in European life to accelerate the slow medieval rhythm and stimulate the emergence of modernity”. Opium, however, paints time via another geography.

Unlike these other substances, opium was desirable not only for sybaritic ends, but for deliberately extractive ones, and this extractivism was directed specifically towards the Chinese market for the purpose of acquiring Chinese goods. In this sense, opium does not just have any sort of relationship to modernity, but one that is coded as specifically Chinese. Over the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British had devised elaborate circuits of extraction to staunch the torrent of silver flowing into China in exchange for Chinese wares like tea, porcelain, and silk.² Confronted with labyrinthine trade restrictions on the one hand and the Qing’s utter lack of interest in the latest, new-fangled Western knickknacks on the other,³ the British found a panacea in the opium poppy, which thrived in areas the British had colonised in India. Through the licensed merchants of the East India Company (EIC), who traded opium to the Chinese for silver, bullion flowed back to British coffers (Spence 1990, 130). The EIC would then exchange this incoming silver for more Chinese goods. Thus, the sale of opium extracted not only the silver the Chinese had earned for their wares, but also the Chinese goods that Europeans had always coveted.

Opium, moreover, also bears a special association with Chinese coolie labour. Not only did the drug disrupt Qing society as a whole, it also played a complex role in the lives of the Chinese labourers who made their way to plantations abroad as indentured hands. Evelyn Hu-DeHart (2005) and Michael González (1995, 207-208) posit that opium use was both a strategy for survival for oppressed Chinese workers in the face of adversity and a form of social control employed by coolie traders and plantation owners who wanted to keep the Chinese migrants in peonage. Chinese labourers en route to Latin America and the Caribbean from Macau received a ration of opium that might have helped them endure the journey (Hu-DeHart 2005, 174). After the Chinese arrived at plantations in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia, opium helped lessen the brunt of manual labour. González (1995) explains that on Peruvian plantations, planters exploited opium addiction to maintain the bondage of Chinese workers and push them to produce more. Addiction to the opium provided by planters kept Chinese plantation labourers in debt, and planters also used the drug as an incentive or withheld it as a penalty. However, not only did the lethargic effects of opium often decrease productivity, but many Chinese also turned to the drug as a means of suicide (González 1995, 207-208). Adauto Botelho and Pedro Pernambuco Filho (1924, 76), physicians in Rio in the early twentieth century, like these other commentators on opium, also note that Chinese labourers took opium pills while working. In each of these places, the development of fumeries in the enclaves Chinese migrant labourers later formed – often in the shadiest parts of town – and with which they came to be associated, further coded opium as Chinese.⁴ Thus, it is not enough to regard the presence of opium in these Brazilian crônicas of the Belle Époque as simply a trope of the fin-de-siècle. Rather, the peculiarity of opium’s material trajectory compels a reading of Rio’s modernity in light of the drug’s Chinese inter-imperial histories.

Opium may have been coded as Chinese in the popular Brazilian and global imaginaries, but what it actually was is a far more complex matter. Was it, for instance, a plant, a commodity, a drug, an imaginary, a technology, or vital matter? Several scholars who have turned an attentive eye towards the role of material things in postcolonial modernity have provided useful models from which I derive and expand my own framework for how opium functions as a mode of postcolonial thinking. Ericka Beckman (2013, 30) characterises coffee in José Martí’s Guatemala as “a site of imagination and fantasy” that signed and dreamed a utopian liberal economic reform in the country. Jill Casid (2005, 1-2) argues that botanical aggregation was not just, as is often taken for granted, a unique postcolonial topos of hybridity, but “colonial landscaping” – a technology of empire that sustained imperial power. When Ramos (2010) writes that “tobacco stimulates the activity of Voltaire” and that colonial commodities “intervened in European life to accelerate the slow medieval rhythm and stimulate the emergence of modernity”, however, I get the sense that his implication is also quite literal and bottom-up from the place of things (60, my italics). These commodities are not just poetics or apparatuses, but material agents that accelerate minds, bodies and, by extension, machines.⁵

Opium is all of these things and more. Like Beckman’s coffee, opium inspires visions of wealth that were then translated to reality. More than capturing the imagination with reveries of prosperity, however, it is also an extractive technology – cultivated, harvested, processed, and traded to sustain the British Empire by extracting silver and Chinese goods from China. In a function parallel but converse to Ramos’s tobacco, coffee, tea, and chocolate that stimulated modernity, drugs like opium and hashish sustained modernity through dream-like states heavy with signifiers of exoticism. But here is where things really get interesting. Opium is not coffee or tea, nor is it alcohol. Its euphoria-inducing alkaloids epitomise vital, agentic matter, and while its chemical properties stoke visions and desires of paradis artificiels, they are also radically unbridled and undisciplined, indiscriminate of the very racial and geographical boundaries they were employed to enforce.

These material peculiarities of opium – its protean ontology on the one hand and its gesturing towards China on the other – invite us to bring this plant-commodity-drug to the fore as a way of thinking through coloniality. I re-construe the material substance of opium as both theory and praxis to describe a process by which imperial desire, taken to its limits, undoes the very botanical and commodity networks that it has amassed. Taken as a theoretical model, opium is not simply the Wunderkammer that bolsters colonial fictions of nuclei and margins by bringing together items that are believed to be global or exotic into a central display. Nor does the convergence that opium occasions stop at the ingenious recombination of diverse elements into a new and better cultural model, as prescribed by theories of transculturation.⁶ Rather, opium traces a process by which these models of colonial mixing are pushed past their limits into a discharge – the material residues of colonialism made stark – that self-reflexively critiques the process of their creation.

Analysing the particular “Chinese” coding of opium within a Brazilian context, moreover, puts Brazil’s reckoning with its own geopolitical status and rapid transformation from Portuguese colony to seat of the Portuguese Empire, and from Brazilian Empire to a republic – all in the span of a century, no less! – into dialogue with other world systems which no doubt impacted Brazil’s formation, but which are not usually studied alongside Brazil because of the ingrained Eurocentric tendencies academia.⁷ Indeed, the glimpse “Visões d’ópio” offers into the circulation of opium and the lives of the Chinese in Rio at the turn of the century is inextricable from other imperial systems and the global movement of coolies. This interconnection between empire and the global transit of coolies and slaves is what Ana Paulina Lee (2018) has termed “circumoceanic” circulation in Mandarin Brazil, in which she argues that Chinese immigration, which featured prominently in debates over slave and free labour in nineteenth-century Brazil, shaped Brazilian notions of race and nation. The displacement of opium, then, from a “far eastern” history adds to Lee’s inter-imperial framework from a materialist perspective, as well as Paul Gilroy’s (1993, 2) analysis that “the reflexive cultures and consciousness of the European settlers and those of the Africans they enslaved, the ‘Indians’ they slaughtered, and the Asians they indentured were not, even in situations of the most extreme brutality, sealed off hermetically from each other”.⁸ Opium, I argue, is part and parcel of Brazilian modernity, simultaneously contributing to Brazil’s experience of cosmopolitan interconnection and revealing the ugly underbelly of the racialised agricultural labour that is modernity’s legacy.

Here it is important to note, however, that though I trace João do Rio’s imperial desire as he pursues the Chinese and opiated fantasies through the margins of the city, I am not inscribing a coloniser-colonised relationship onto Brazil and China, a reduction that Junyoung Verónica Kim (2017, 98) has perceptively described as the attempt to translate non-conventional cross-cultural studies into ill-fitting “universalistic rubric[s]”.⁹ Indeed, neither Brazil nor China colonised the other,¹⁰ and Brazil’s own status between colony and empire was also ambiguous. This is why the concept I term opium as theory, more than anything, is an epistemological reckoning with empire, the process of working out Brazil’s geopolitical positioning in the world. The convergence of geography that a theory of opium depicts is sticky and sap-like, one of messiness, excess, and discharge. Opium as theory allows for an understanding of geographical amassment as one that undoes itself. Though opium is an extractive tool par excellence, it has an unstable quality – it amasses but also undoes; it takes other models to their limits.

Opium as theory

From the very outset, João do Rio’s crônica on opium establishes that it is an exploration of Rio’s geopolitical positioning, mediated through opium. The crônica opens with a question, posed aloud by the writer to his friend, “The opium eaters?”. The question is part of a longer exchange that explores the drug’s relationship to the city. Suspended between this question and its reply, however, is an expository passage that fills in the journalistic musts of who, what, when, where, and why with stunning geographic specificity. At six o’clock in the evening, the two men are on the beach of Santa Luzia, at the entrance of the Misericórdia neighborhood, where they had ventured to catch a glimpse of an ether-addict who had cracked his head on the sidewalk from a long night of carousing. It is sunset, and the writer’s depiction of the environs, apart from painting the city’s dusk in ravishing colours, pays particular attention to geographical detail. He describes:

The lines of the city softened in the opal clarity of the marvellous evening. From afar, the brume enveloped the forts, scaled the skies, cut the horizon into a bar of musky purple and, emerging from this agony of colours, darker and hazier, the hills, Pão de Açúcar, São Bento, Castelo appeared in a tranquil splendour. (1910, 105)

The sunset brume outlines the contours of the city, and important landmarks like the São José fort on the Isle of Snakes (Ilha das Cobras), and the emblematic Sugar Loaf, São Bento, and Castelo hills – visible from where the writer stands on the western shore of the Guanabara Bay – carve out the city’s coastline.

The geographical specificity and the “tranquil splendour” of the setting, however, subtly give way to a stranger and more unsettling language of place. The writer’s continued description of the landscape becomes dream-like, and, rather than familiar, it becomes unhomely:

The breeze rustled over the weave of great leafy mango trees, tamarinds, and flamboyants, and the landscape had a dreamy air. It was no longer the beach of the fishermen and the vagabonds that we knew so well; it was a stretch of Algiers, of Nice, a panoramic vision beneath the golden stars. (105-106)

Here, it is significant that these characteristic trees of Rio give off “a dreamy air”. Indeed, the intimate relationship between botanical assemblage and exotic dreamscapes was a favoured motif of the imperial imagination at the turn of the century. Particularly notable is Henri Rousseau’s The Dream (1910). Never having left France, he modelled the jungle in his painting from the collection of plants from across the empire in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. In my reading of this particular crônica, as well as other Brazilian literature on opium, this connection between agricultural accumulation and the trance-like, often opiated dreams of the early twentieth century gains special importance, as I argue that the latter are legacies of earlier forms of agricultural subjugation.

The uncanny sensation of the scene comes not only from this oneiric quality of the landscape, however. What is more unsettling is the way this dreamscape transforms the epistemology of place in a sort of double-take, or delayed second reaction to something unexpected. The picturesque description of the Carioca coast that readers knew so well and might have taken for granted is in fact laden with double meanings that push towards a revised understanding of Rio’s geography. For example, the word “rustle” (rumorejar) evocatively illustrates the evening breeze moving about the leaves of the trees, but in the Portuguese this word’s other denotations, “to tell secrets, to speak in a whisper; to gossip” or “to spread [rumours]”,¹¹ insinuates that there are darker currents beneath the picturesque landscape. Likewise, the use of the Portuguese word “trama”, which I’ve translated as “weave”, to describe the enmeshed vista of mango trees, tamarinds, and flamboyants, vividly captures the tangled growth of the flourishing trees, but the word’s polysemic valences – “network”, “plot” (both as in “machination” or “scheme” and the more literary sense of “diegesis”) – cannot help but to also gesture towards something less innocuous. João do Rio’s description of “a aragem [que] rumoreja[] em cima a trama das grandes mangueiras folhudas, dos tamarindeiros e dos flamboyants” [the breeze that rustles above the intermeshed foliage] invites an eerie double-reading in Portuguese to mean equally “the breeze that divulges the secrets of” that same foliage (105). To depict these plants as an entangled “network” (trama) is also to recall the complot of how they came to be: that is, through the matrices of cross-continental imperial flows that disseminated plants and positioned them as commodities.

And indeed, these three species that are so distinctive to the panorama of Rio are all colonial transplants, whose presence in Brazil tells a narrative of Portuguese and other imperial maritime expansions. The mango and tamarind are autochthonous to India, and the flamboyant is endemic to Madagascar. According to botanists S.J. Mukherjee and Richard Litz (2009, 10), the mango found its way to Brazil when the Portuguese transplanted the plant from the Indian subcontinent to Mozambique and Angola, and then from these African colonies to Brazil. The elaborate route by which these botanists have traced the mango’s presence in Brazil further serves to emphasise the disquieting histories rooted in Rio’s landscape.

Moreover, though the text does not mention by name the Royal Botanical Garden – significant for its own role in transferring plant species from Portuguese and other European colonies – the latent presence of this space is central to my reading of this crônica as well.¹² During João do Rio’s time, all three plants featured prominently in the Botanical Garden, where they represented both common-sight tropical flora in Rio and collected species of Asiatic and African origins.¹³ The garden was also the site of the first Chinese “immigration” to Rio. In 1814, the prince regent Dom João VI imported Chinese labourers from the Portuguese colony of Macau for the specific purpose of cultivating tea on the grounds of the garden (Lustosa 2007, 9).

It is telling, then, given these latent histories, that the landforms before João do Rio – the hills and forts and trees – comprise not only the familiar borders of the Carioca coast; they are also “a stretch of Algiers, of Nice, a panoramic vision beneath the golden stars”. There is something disquieting about the dislocation of the Mediterranean onto Rio’s hills, and indeed the comparison between the cities is made more unhomely by the direct juxtaposition of the familiar and the unfamiliar in the two independent clauses, “It was no longer the beach (…) we knew so well; it was a part of Algiers, of Nice, a visionary landscape beneath the golden stars”. The amalgamation of the French and Algerian port cities within Rio’s coast makes the Brazilian city further complicit in a constellation of imperial imaginaries.

Reframing the city through opium, however, makes these unhomely geographies stark. When the setting up of the scene comes to a close, the two men continue their dialogue on the drug. In response to the writer’s opening question (“The opium eaters?”) and in reaction to the maimed etheromaniac, the companion replies, “Yes (…) ether is a vice that makes us high, an aristocratic vice. I know others still more brutal: opium, the desperation of opium” (106). At these words, the narrator reacts with astonishment. The awe in his reply – “But here!” – not only highlights the incongruousness of opium in the tropical topography of Rio de Janeiro, as if the Chinese drug ought not to belong; the particular spatial slant of his prompt for clarification also opens up new hermeneutic possibilities of understanding the space of the city. The strange exposition of the crônica that sets up the scene has in fact been embedded within a dialogue on opium, and notably, as the two men begin to experience the city through the conduit of the drug, an analogous, subaltern city begins to take form, and the populace and parameters alike of the dreamlike Rio “of the great leafy mango trees, the tamarinds, and the flamboyants” take on new, nightmarish dimensions from the margins.

“Here”, the friend confirms,

You’ve never spent much time with the Chinamen [os chins] in the streets of the old city, never talked with these gum-colored faces who loiter behind the Morgue and are pursued, at stone’s throws, by exploiting gypsies, have you? You gentlemen don’t know this great city that Estácio de Sá once defended from the French. Rio is a seaport, it’s cosmopolis in a kaleidoscope, it’s the beach where the ocean brings its ebbing tide. (106)

This alternative Rio de Janeiro is one whose inhabitants are “the exploiting gypsies” and “the Chinamen in the streets of the old city”, and whose city limits are delineated not only by an agonisingly beautiful mauve horizon and the Sugar Loaf, São Bento, and Castelo hills, but by notably more ominous spatial markers like the Morgue. The friend’s challenge that “you gentlemen don’t know this great city that Estácio de Sá once defended from the French” further emphasises the epistemological undoing of place experienced through opium (my italics). His retracing the contours of the city – what can be known and understood about it – back to Estácio de Sá’s founding of Rio in 1565 unravels the official understandings of the city, encrusted in foundations of almost mythical proportion, and gestures towards a reworking of geographical knowledge from the matter of opium.

To know this particular city as filtered through opium in fact demands a more radical, experiential metaphor, which also doubles as a theoretical proposition for working out an understanding of Rio’s postcoloniality. “Rio is a seaport”, the friend begins, and then more fancifully, “it’s cosmopolis in a kaleidoscope, it’s the beach where the ocean brings its ebbing tide”. The analogies posit the centrality of Rio as a cultural hub and oceanic coordinate, no less than any metropole – no doubt, the result of a sharply emergent reckoning of its own position within a transnational landscape at the fin-de-siècle.¹⁴ But these descriptions of the port city are also metaphors of a colonial process that throw the network of imperialist associations latent within Rio’s oneiric landscape into stark relief, and, indeed, begin to disentangle the disquieting dislocation of Rio’s hills into the Mediterranean in the crônica’s exposition. More than simply pinning a finger on imperial legacies as the source of the uncanny in Rio’s dreamscape, these metaphors parse Rio’s geopolitical formation through a more precise model of postcolonial thinking, founded less on challenging the colonial stratagems of subjugation or mimicry, than on experimenting with merging – that is, desire taken to its all-encompassing extreme. Taken to its limits, this compulsion of colonial desire undoes its very gratification through excess. To re-conceptualise Rio through the “desperation of opium” as the author’s friend suggests is to recognise not only the colonial desires implicit in the city’s cosmopolitan formation, but also the irony of these visions’ ultimate unsustainability.

Each of these metaphors indeed employs a contradictory language of simultaneous accumulation and disintegration, with a particular bodily bent. João do Rio’s friend speaks of not just any seaport, but the Guanabara Bay, whose name comes from the Tupi words guaná (breast) and pará (sea), which pieced together mean the “breast or bosom of the sea”.¹⁵ The understanding of the Guanabara as the breast at which ships come to suckle makes manifest the potent desire of commodity flows – particularly that of the in-pouring of European manufactures in exchange for Brazilian agricultural products at Rio’s docks (Conde 2012; Sevcenko 1997). To think of the Guanabara through its Tupi roots as “the bosom of the sea” is also to think towards the relational model it outlines. As the breast is, to the infatuated infant, as much an extension of self as it is a part of the (m)other, the particular conceptualisation of Rio as a breast proposes a latent coloniality fuelled by a desire for merging.¹⁶

The metaphor of Rio as “cosmopolis in a kaleidoscope” functions as both a more apposite description of a Rio disparate enough for the far-reaching jouissance of opium to exist, and as a model of postcolonial thinking that pushes the language of colonial amalgamation to its limits. As cosmopolis in a kaleidoscope, Rio becomes motley and urbane in equal measure. More interesting, however, is the mode of the metaphor itself. The analogy’s imperial implications are clear in its motion to condense the globe into a graspable object. But here, desire gives in to itself, for the object which is held, indeed, which the body desires to assimilate to itself as an eye, gives rise to a dizzyingly infinite assemblage of permutations of sight.

To call Rio “the beach where the ocean brings its ebbing tide” similarly depicts and theorises a space where, as the friend goes on to explain, “There’s a bit of everything: vices, horrors, people of all shades, nihilistic Romanians, Russian professors in misery, Spanish anarchists, licentious gypsies. Every race brings qualities that, here, bloom into a delirious sap” (106). It is this “vaza”, the ebb and flow of current at low tide, that conglomerates and reveals the jetsam of motley characters gathered on the shore. Yet once again, this description that seeks to approximate with greater precision this hybrid and unsavoury city under the influence of opium slips self-reflexively into theorising the model of postcolonial heterogeneity itself. Curiously, João do Rio chooses to use the word “bring” (traz) instead of the more intuitive “pull” or “take away” (retirar) to describe the ocean’s retracting waves. In this urban space, whose edge and draw culminate from the very diversity of its flows – vices, horrors, races, and then some – the merging of the beach and the waves dissipates at the climax of the tide.

This undoing of the imperial desire for a flourishing whole by the very mechanism of this desire itself, carried to its limits, becomes ever starker through a minute reading of the friend’s avowal, “Every race brings qualities that, here, bloom (desabrocham) into a delirious sap (seiva delirante)” (106). The polysemic quality of the friend’s words points to a colonial imagination that both rhapsodically amasses together and divulges its own unsettling underbelly. The word “desabrochar”, meaning “to flower”, also carries with it a connotation of “unfurling” or losing structure or control, especially in this context in which the accumulation of racial difference from across the world denatures into a sap.¹⁷ “Seiva”, likewise, in Portuguese refers to both the vegetable sap that pumps sugar and minerals to the rest of the plant body and to a bodily substance or discharge. “Delirante”, as well, is both a state of ecstasy and of incoherency.¹⁸ To read “desabroch[ar] numa seiva delirante” as “to flower in an ecstatic sap” is to eulogise the abiding assumption of Brazilian planters, European travellers, and transitioning monarchs alike that any fruit or flora transplanted to Brazilian soil – and tilled by a diversity of labouring races – would flourish better than in its native land. This first understanding traces the contours of an imagination that envisioned the amalgamation of disparate plants into the Brazilian earth, together with the people to cultivate their growth, as a strategy of economic and cultural primacy. To read “desabrochar” as “to undo”, however, in conjunction with “delirious sap” as an unhinged mess of discharge, is to gesticulate the bewildering aftermath of desire, in which the impulse to transplant and acquire, taken to its limits, loses the very definition and control that it sought to amass.

This metaphor of modern Rio, which also divulges the city’s latent extractivist histories, also embodies the material experience of opium itself. This understanding of “seiva delirante” most literally as a “crazy-making sap” helps to explain more concretely how opium acts as a theory of colonial relations that both brings to the fore strategies of imperial consolidation and perturbs the very coherency these practices dictate. In one respect, to “blossom into a delirious sap” points to the life-cycle of the poppy plant and the production of opium. About thirteen weeks after the germination of newly planted poppy seeds, a flower blooms and the petals of the poppy blossom quickly fall away to reveal a seedpod, which, when cut, oozes a milky white sap that then becomes the base material for opium the drug (Booth 1999, 2-5). Read as “to undo oneself into delirium”, on the other hand, “desabroch[ar] numa seiva delirante”, also sketches the progression of an opium high, from its initial ecstasy to its resulting disorientation.

These two facets of opium – its production as a plant and its consumption as a drug – are less two distinct ends of a spectrum than they are blurred processes that should be viewed together. And in fact, this slippery ontology between plant, crop, commodity, drug, and alkaloid compound makes opium an ideal analytical medium to parse extractive colonialism. As a plant, opium incites enraptured dreams of transplanted crops flourishing on plantations on colonised land, and as a commodity, it became an ersatz silver that extracted an outpouring of tea and other Chinese wares. More potent than a plant like tea, however, opium and its euphoric, sense-altering properties actualise the imperial merging of disparate plants and lands to the point that the user becomes one with the visions and sensations of exotic topographies and peoples – indeed, his body becomes the productive site of these experiences – until he loses all bodily faculty. Desire, both the mechanism and the product of imperial flows, taken to its limits, hits a fever pitch until it becomes disoriented and undone.

Beyond narrative device – the crônica frames its expository descriptions of Rio within a diegetic conversation about opium – opium becomes a conduit through which to understand the city and its complex legacies of coloniality. As a medium, the drug reworks the city in terms of both material histories and felt experience and the intersection of its phantasmagoric “social life”¹⁹ and its blatant materiality invents a new way of understanding Rio’s geopolitical identity.

Opium as praxis

With the close of a panegyric that serves both to depict the true Rio under the “desperation of opium” and to unfold a theory of critical geography, the friend offers an invitation that puts theory into practice. “The Chinese are the remnants of the infamous immigration, they sell fish on the beach and live between Misericórdia Street and Dom Manuel Street. At five o’clock they leave their work and head home to the formidable fumeries. Want to see them now?” (106). The friend’s tantalising prompt sets off a descent into the opium dens to find “the Chinamen of Rio”.

In many ways, the pursuit of opium and its Chinese smokers and distributors, like the drug itself, is an account of desire that pushes against its own limits to produce greater appetites – the first of the fumeries the men visit is not enough. The friend informs João do Rio, “This is only the first scene, the beginning. The Chinamen prepare themselves for intoxication. They haven’t even had an hour of the pipe. But by now in other places they must have reached stupefaction, excitation and dreams” (110-111). The hankering for opium and ever-heightening need for its intoxicating effects describe not just any desire, but an organising impulse that brings order to geography. The invitation “Want to see them now?” suggests the voyeuristic fascination towards spectacles of the aberrant employed in World’s Fairs and similar displays of imperial knowledge and power. Many of those exhibited as human Others, like pygmies and Siamese twins, held an appeal for not only what was seen as their peculiar physical aberrations, but for the particular inflection of their racial or ethnological difference.

Indeed, it is essential to emphasise that this account of desire takes the particular dimension of specific imperial histories. João do Rio’s following the trail of opium is both a self-inscription into opium’s networks and an etching of the drug’s circulatory routes onto the urban space of Rio. In order to penetrate the fumeries, his companion-turned-guide instructs that the two men pose as opium dealers. “I have a tip for four or five houses. We go in as opium suppliers. You’ve just come from London, you’ve got a kilo, close to six hundred grams of opium from Bombay”. The dissimulated identities recreate the drug’s epicentres and imperial trails via several signifiers of colonial trade networks. The roles the two men are to play reprise opium’s movement from its production base in Bombay to its British distribution centre – whereby “London” signifies the British empire or the British East India Company that powered the opium trade – to the first fumerie they visit at Rio de Janeiro’s no. 19 Beco dos Ferreiros, “an oriental vision of the lugubrious dens of Shanghai”.

The imposing dreams of empire mapped by opium contrast sharply, however, with the material grime of its nightmarish realities. To reprise opium’s imperial trade networks in Rio is to capitulate to an ever-increasing desire to articulate Rio’s position at the centre of the world, but it is also to venture deeper into the city’s shadiest neighbourhoods. As the two men walk through the neighbourhood of Misericórdia, an infamous “Chinatown” of sorts due to its many fumeries, they see opium’s aftermath in the abject poverty of the Chinese quarters. The journalist describes a narrow alleyway lined with decrepit tenement housing, in which the overcrowded inhabitants are packed into one room. The comparison of the clothes hanging on bamboo rods from the windows to “festive rags flying on high” indicates the cheap quality of cloth the impoverished residents of this neighbourhood can afford, but the metaphor also takes on the image of flags marking out a subaltern district that is completely alien to the wealth that opium extracts. In fact, this is a place that is so wretched that misery manifests itself as a material film. On the dilapidated façades of the crooked buildings, misery coats – indeed, João do Rio uses the word “anoints” (besunta), as if to sacrilegiously set apart – the run-down paint with dirt and grease. The interiors of the fumeries, as well, bear squalid material markers at odds with the modernity that opium projects. At no. 19 Beco dos Ferreiros, “the heavy, greasy atmosphere nearly suffocates” the writer.

The pursuit of opium – and the attendant enactment of its global circuits – maps Rio into imperial networks. Yet paradoxically, this practice also betrays the stark costs of modernity. As the narrator and his guide negotiate a deal to sell opium to Chinese smokers at no. 72 Dom Manuel Street, the spasmodic sobs of an opium smoker crying out “Sapan… sapan… Hanoi… tahï…” punctuates the transaction (114). Another Chinese man explains, “He is dreaming. Affal is dreaming. Opium sleep… our dear homeland… pretty! pretty! Show sample” (114). Affal’s disjointed cry under the lull of opium is eerily reminiscent of the Carioca coast that is “no longer the beach (…) we knew so well”, but rather – oddly jointed together – “a stretch of Algiers, of Nice”. The man’s opiated dreams negotiate the process of working out imperial geographies in Brazil by stringing together a jumbled assortment of coordinates – plants, commodities, places – that piece together a colonial map within the slums of Rio. “Sapan”, a type of Brazil-wood grown in Japan,²⁰ reflects a history of Portuguese imperial transactions, as well as the agricultural extractivism that served as the basis of empire. During the period of French occupation in Vietnam, Hanoi was the capital of French Indochina from 1887 to the mid-twentieth century and also the site of the World’s Fair from 1902 to 1903, just a few years before the publication of João do Rio’s crônica (Vann 2004, 181-191). The meaning of the word “tahï”, while more nebulous, within the context of the crônica could refer to the common name in Malay of several plant species in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines, or conversely, in the same language, to “filth; mucus; dirt; ordure”.²¹

Once again, the opiated imagination extends the seductive promise of amalgamation, but it cannot contain itself. In an uncontrolled incontinence, the imperial desire that aggregates commodities, flora, and colonial capitals into one place undoes itself, and, in doing so, reveals the disposable excesses of the drug’s promises of wealth and progress. The coordinates of Affal’s dream, which merge together disparate things and places into an aspirational map of empire, at the same time divulge the painful memory of his displacement as he yearns for “our beloved homeland”. Thus, conceptualising opium in the full extension of its material valences – in this case, scatological – unwittingly brings to the fore the devoured bodies of the enslaved peoples and coolies who planted the currency of agricultural regimes. The dream of imperial aspirations is simultaneously its material trace in the form of a fetid bodily discharge and its stain on the colonial imaginary.

Opium’s undisciplined materiality, however, pushes even further. Uncontrollable and unbound by the racial and geographical logic it inspires and was employed to maintain, the drug undoes the very thinker of colonial desire. At the climax of the crônica, the fumes of the drug assault the narrator, push his body to its physical limits, and utterly disorient his relationship to space. “I can’t take it any more”, he writes, “Stomach cramps make me feel an enormous urge to throw up. Just the stench of the opium disorients me.” Still, the material fumes of the drug push the limits by thrusting the narrator further into what he desires:

I see myself in the streets of Tientsin, at the door of straw shacks, pursued by the imperial guard, trembling with fear; I see myself in the taverns of Singapore, with the bodies of the celestials dragged in rickshaws, between crazy Malays brandishing murderous kris daggers! Oh! Subtle venom, slumber’s teardrop, abbreviation of paradise, great Killer of the Orient! How did I come to find you in these ruins of Cosmopolis, tearing to shreds some poor wretches from the provinces of China! (114-115)

As in plantations or botanical gardens, in which displaced seeds or saplings make graspable disparate geographies and bring them together into a coherent whole, in the visions rendered by opium, diverse Asian topographies pan out side by side. More than a rapid montage of heterogeneous terrains over which man is master, however, these lands manifest themselves from the fulfilment of desire at its rhapsodic height – at the moment of merging of man and land, of drug and man – and it is the experience of this desire, taken to its limits, which undoes itself to ruin.

In the febrile pursuit of opium, João do Rio fulfils his desire to see “the Chinamen”. But this desire begets greater desire, and as he ventures further and deeper into the debaucheries of the night and the inferno of the fumeries, it is not enough to observe the Chinese from afar. He must also see what they see. Opium takes the desire of the gaze to another level and in this sense João do Rio does not merely see, but inhabits. The Latin roots of this very word “inhabit” (“in” + “habitare”, from habere) spell out the intimacies between “to dwell” (habitare) and “to have” (habere). Indeed, the nature of opium is to convert the body at the moment of possession of the object into the very site of the object’s production, and in this way continually stoke desire. The uncontrolled appetite of these opiated visions, however, thrusts him to the brink of death. At the apogee of his nightmarish reverie – the limit of life itself – João do Rio “grip[s] [his] head between [his] hands, opens [his] mouth anxiously” (numa ânsia) to cry, “Let’s get out of here, or I’ll die!” (115). Here, the Portuguese word “ânsia”, differently from English, takes the double meaning of intense distress and desire.

The overwhelming sensation of precarity in the narrator’s delirium is not unfounded. To dream what Affal dreams is to embody visions not unburdened with their own imperial histories, and, as such diffusers of memory, these opiated visions force a reckoning with the amalgamation of power through agricultural imaginaries. Both of the visions João do Rio experiences through opium have a historical basis. In Tientsin, the imperial guard beat back the Eight-Nation Alliance during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, fuelled mostly by anger towards the unequal treaties rendered by the Opium Wars (Elleman 2005, 131; Spence 1990, 231-233). In British-controlled Singapore most of the Chinese population – whom João do Rio pejoratively depicts as “celestials” (celestes) – were migrants working as indentured labourers on pepper and gambier plantations who often turned to opium to soften the brunt of manual labour (Trocki 2019).

This undoing of desire into reckoning is also apparent in João do Rio’s final apostrophe to opium at the tail end of his reverie, “Oh! Subtle venom, slumber’s teardrop, abbreviation of paradise, great Killer of the Orient!” (114-115). At an elemental level, “slumber’s teardrop” refers metonymically to the globule of opium resin that smokers soften over an opium lamp. Here, however, João do Rio has taken the metonym further as metaphor; “slumber’s teardrop” is also an “abbreviation of paradise” (resumo do paraíso). The tropes of bliss (as both a state and a place) and botanical aggregation (as in recreations of the Garden of Eden) clearly resound in the word “paradise”. The Portuguese noun “resumo”, which I’ve translated as “abbreviation” to capture its dual connotations of something that is both complete (summary) and pared down, then intensifies the colonial associations of the word “paradise” in its condensing disparate Asian topographies into one space, at the same time that it paradoxically signals the dissolution of colonial aspirations. The “abbreviation of paradise” that is also “slumber’s teardrop” is indeed strangely globe-like, a graspable conglomeration of the world. At the ultimate moment of possession, however – that is to say, the moment of ingestion, the moment of merging of drug and man – the promises of paradise released into the bloodstream immerse the body in its desires and destroy it. It is not without reason, then, that the narcotic globule that converts the body into a producer of paradise doubles as an involuntary bodily discharge of grief, a teardrop. This teardrop of paradise is “the great Killer of the Orient” that rips to shreds “poor wretches from the provinces of China”, and whose fumes transport João do Rio to the brink of death.

Concluding thoughts

More than simply evidence of Rio’s worldly status in the Belle Époque, the presence of opium thinks the complexities of Rio’s global positioning through a very peculiar geographic and material intersection. This singularity of opium is also why I argue that this particular crônica not only contributes to João do Rio’s oeuvre as a whole, but deserves to be highlighted with its own in-depth reading. Though the drug’s montage-like mapping of Parisian habits and Asian locales onto the city easily transforms Rio into a tropical amalgam of East and West, I argue that this is not the only way we should read the piece. And though “Visões d’ópio” is perfectly legible as a tropical emulation of trending European Orientalisms (João do Rio’s heavily pejorative depiction of the Chinese, though not within the scope of this article, cannot be discounted), I argue that there is something more complex at work. The filtering of Rio’s modernity through a drug stained with exploits of Chinese empire, in fact, marks an improper convergence that makes stark the processes and costs of Rio’s own imperial precedents. It brings to light, in particular, the disquieting circulation of botanical transplants and labourers that have formed the very contours of Rio’s characteristic topography. Thus, opium becomes a new analytical category to analyse João do Rio’s writing and thinking.

As a theoretical model, opium’s exotic associations and its extractive potential build upon each other in an ever-heightening feedback loop. But at the limits of desire, its uncontrolled chemical effects on the body spill beyond the racial and territorial boundaries it has been employed to demarcate. Likewise, as a bodily practice, the pursuit of opium is a spatial strategy that marks Rio’s place in the world; yet it also unpredictably deviates from the very power differentials it seeks to delineate. To see, smell, commingle, and merge with the drug, the writer must retrace opium’s imperial routes of power onto the city he traverses, a process that simultaneously inscribes the writer himself as complicit in those networks. Yet, this enactment of opium’s planetary imaginaries materialises modernity’s costs and destabilises into a way of thinking. The allure of opium that impels João do Rio towards the Chinese fumeries disruptively reveals the precarity and displacement of those excluded from modernising enterprises and upon whom these projects depend.

Taken together, the presence and practice of opium in João do Rio’s work comprise a critical methodology – reading “Visões d’ópio” through the material history and agency of opium itself complicates canonical understandings of the Brazilian Belle Époque. More importantly, opium’s materiality serves as a novel postcolonial framework that, through a series of double-takes and transgressions, not only brings Brazilian modernity into dialogue with global Chinese histories, but also implodes the processes of Brazil’s reckoning with its inter-imperial past and future.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Zeb Tortorici for helping me work out a material language for opium and for the ceaseless encouragements to boldly push these ideas further. Many thanks are also due to the interlocutors who read and commented on earlier drafts of this article: Jens Andermann, Laura Torres-Rodríguez, Gabriel Giorgi, the NYU Pacific Working Group (Matthew Nicdao, Erica Feild, Lee Xie, Carlos Yebra López, Andrés Caicedo, and Angela Haddad), and the two anonymous reviewers from the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. Fernanda Senger and Francisco Pires offered their expertise on the nuances of language for the words I close-read.

Disclosure statement

No competing interests reported.

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Notes on contributors

Fan Fan

Fan Fan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. She researches critical geographies, race, and materialism at the intersections of Asia and Latin America in literature, visual culture, and film. Her dissertation examines how the circulation of commodities between Brazil and China shapes Brazilian views towards race, migration, and geopolitics in literature, art, and popular culture.

Notes

1 All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. For interested readers, a superb translation of the entire crônica (titled “Opium Visions”) can be found in Mark Carlyon’s (2010) bilingual edition of The Enchanting Soul of the Streets. I use my own translations of the crônica here to better capture the nuances of the words I close-read. I translate from the H. Garnier edition (1910) of João do Rio’s A alma encantadora das ruas.

2 Jonathan D. Spence writes, “by 1800, the East India Company was buying over 23 million pounds of Chinese tea at a cost of L3.6 million” (1990, 122).

3 European merchants faced many trade restrictions in China. They could only trade in the port of Canton, reside there for only six months of the year, and had no direct access to the Qing government. Rather, their communication was limited to Hong merchants who in turn communicated with the Hoppo, the trade official appointed by the Qing Court (Spence 1990, 122).

4 For an alternative take on how these unscrupulous spaces are coded as Chinese, see Raymond Rast’s “The Cultural Politics of Tourism in San Francisco’s Chinatown, 1882-1917” (2007). Rast’s perspective emphasises the agency of Chinese residents in forming the cultural narratives of Chinatowns.

5 Ramos’s observation is also evocative of studies of how tea stimulated the industrial revolution.

6 Here I am principally thinking of Fernando Ortiz’s Contrapunteo cubano (1940) in a wider Latin American context. Within a Brazilian context, Gilberto Freyre’s (1933) argument that the malleable Portuguese, bridging Europe and Africa, had created a more harmonious postcolonial society in Brazil than other European colonisers is another example of using a “unique recombination” strategy to reckon with colonial legacies.

7 See the work of Junyoung Verónica Kim (2017), Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010).

8 See also Lisa Lowe (2015).

9 Kim criticises the fact that “[t]he only way [Asia-Latin America] can be legitimised, that is, ‘understood’, is by translating the project into the very framework of established knowledge production, which often takes a hegemonic notion of comparison, or by translating it into a particular/local knowledge that adds another special cultural identity – such as the Japanese in Brazil or the Koreans in Argentina – to a larger, more universalistic rubric” (2017, 98).

10 Chinese neocolonialism in Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is another story, to be addressed in chapter four of my dissertation, on Adriana Varejão’s reworking of colonial iconographies.

11 Dicionário de português, licensed to Oxford University Press (2016), s.v. “rumorejar”.

12 In 1809 Portuguese armada chief Luis de Abreu Vieira Paiva brought twenty chests of plants to Brazil from the Pamplemousse Botanical Gardens in French-controlled Mauritius, where he was detained after a shipwreck. Cultivated by French botanist Pierre Poivre, the garden boasted flora from throughout Asia and the Americas. The Luso-Brazilian invasion of French Guiana in 1810 also brought 82 new species of plants to Brazil from La Gabrielle garden and other botanical gardens (Lustosa 2007, 9). Also see João Barbosa Rodrigues’s Hortus fluminensis (1895) for a history of the garden contemporary to João do Rio’s time.

13 See João Barbosa Rodrigues’s 1895 Hortus fluminensis, a comprehensive guide to the Botanical Gardens and its species for the general public. Rodrigues was the director of the Botanical Garden from 1890 to 1909 and contributed greatly to its organisation. Finding that the tea specimens of the garden were in ruins, he planted new exemplars as “uma recordação do passado” [a souvenir of the past] (viii). Rodrigues boasts that there are 114 plants that represent Asia and 55 that represent Africa in the gardens (xxxvi). In the descriptions of the plants, he also acknowledges their heritage.

14 I argue elsewhere, however, that consciousness of this position is actually not something new. As early as the start of the nineteenth century, Brazilian elites had imagined Brazil as what I term a “surrogate China” through the plantation of tea. In the early twentieth century, the onset of modern life and its concomitant technologies and changes sharpened this transnational landscape. Cinema (and its montages) in particular helped to fashion the conglomeration of disparate geographies within one space (Conde 2012).

15 João Guimarães Rosa (1965, 70) explains that this understanding of the name Guanabara permeated Brazilian popular culture through the work of nineteenth-century etymologist Batista Caetano, who studied the usage of Tupi-Guaraní during the colonial period. See also: Adriano Pedrosa and Adriana Varejão (2013, 208) on Adriana Varejão’s painting Viagem ao seio da Guanabara (2013).

16 In a previous rendition of this article, I had used as the basis for my close-readings a version of the crônica in the 1997 Companhia das Letras reprint of A alma encantadora das ruas, edited by Raul Antelo. In the Antelo edition, the original “porto de mar” had been misprinted, curiously, as “pomo de mar”, which I had not only understood as fanciful language for “seaport”, but had also read through the word pomo’s richer connotations of “fruit” and “breast”. While I’ve revised my reading, I can’t help but acknowledge the typographical error in a petit aside for its wildly generative resonances, a slippage made all the more uncanny by the linguistic genealogy of the Guanabara Bay. The port that is also the “pome of the sea” speaks to the distinctly sexual nature of the history of the imperial flows of people and commodities alike along the Brazilian coast. Understood as “fruit”, the metaphor is reminiscent of the perennial presumption of Brazil’s super-endowed fertility, from the intermingled ecstasies over the naked Indigenous body on the one hand and the fecund land on the other in Pêro Vaz de Caminha’s letter to King Manuel, to the belief of Brazilian planters – to the point of dogma – that non-native plants thrive better in the virility of Brazilian soil than in their motherlands.

Another reason to acknowledge this typo rather than omit it entirely is that its discovery surfaces more complex methodological issues of textual circulation and reading, including those of printing, publishing, archival work, the immutability of texts, and the fatal flaws of close-reading. Editorial decisions regarding João do Rio’s daring language – Shakespearean in its proclivity towards inventing words – have in fact long been a challenge for circulating the writer’s work to a contemporary audience. João Carlos Rodrigues writes in the introduction to his compilation of the journalist’s crônicas Histórias da gente alegre (1981) that he corrected for printing errors in the first editions of João do Rio’s books (“arraigou-se” instead of “enraigou-se”) and adjusted the spelling of foreign words not yet assimilated into the Portuguese language at that time (“jinriquixá” instead of “djinricksha”) (1981, xviii). Moreover, while the Antelo reprint of “Visões d’ópio” has been publicly cited in only two academic theses – most scholars have preferred earlier editions of the text, usually the H. Garnier (1910) or Organização de Simões (1951) editions of A alma ecantadora, and sometimes the José Olympio (1981) edition compiled by Rodrigues – it is nonetheless both a popular and pedagogical introduction of João do Rio’s oeuvre, a status cemented by its publication with major Brazilian publishing house Companhia das Letras during the revival of interest in João do Rio’s works in the 1990s, after a period of relative obscurity following the author’s death (see Carvalho 2013, 83; Rodrigues 1981, xv; Croce 2018, 210).

17 The 1899 edition of the Novo diccionário da lingua portuguesa lists the primary definition of “desabrochar” as to “unclasp” or “unbutton”, which complements the word’s connotation of “undoing” or “unfurling” here. While “desabrochar” no longer carries the connotation of “unbuttoning” in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese, João do Rio was most likely familiar with this definition at the time of the crônica’s first publication in 1905.

18 Ana Paulina Lee (2018) has also noted the specific association between “delirium” and Chineseness in Brazil, noting that this was a term often used in debates on slave and free labour. She also reads the name of a Chinese character in Artur Azevedo’s play O mandarim, Lírio, as deriving from de-lírio (de-lirium) (98-100).

19 By “social life”, I am drawing on the empirical materialisms described by Karl Marx (trans. Dragstedt 1976), Arjun Appadurai (1988), and Elaine Freedgood (2010), among others.

20 As a chapter on “Portuguese America” in an 1809 edition of Monthly Repertory of English Literature suggests, the term might have circulated widely by João do Rio’s time. The entry “Brazil-wood” in Nelson’s Encyclopaedia (1907) also refers to sappan-wood.

21 This is according to Richard James Wilkinson’s 1901 A Malay-English Dictionary.