China is probably growing twice as much opium as it is importing by 1885, although estimates vary widely.

The British consul at Yichang in 1881 had estimated the total opium production in the southwest at thirteen thousand five hundred and twenty-five tons, a figure that at first seems exaggerated. (Twenty-five years later, however, the first official statistics will show that Sichuan and Yunnan were in fact producing nineteen thousand one hundred tons tons, equivalent to fifty-four percent of China's total harvest.)