The bottles have a beautiful aqua color to them. If you hold them up to the light, rainbows fire across the delicate patina.

But their beauty belies the deadly reality behind the delicate hues.

These tiny bottles once held opium-based elixirs, such as Dr. McMunns Elixir of Opium, most claiming to be a cure for whatever ailed you.

Some brands were even marketed to mothers to quiet their babies by putting them to sleep sometimes permanently, through overdosing. Ironically, some brands claimed not to be habit forming! (This is obviously why the Food and Drug Administration was invented.)

The bottles were recovered by a dedicated digger friend of ours scouring the remains of a Chinese hotel that was in operation in the late 1800s in a mining town north of Vancouver, B.C.

So how did opium bottles make their way to a tiny mining town in British Columbia? Indeed, Chinese opium dens of the period have been immortalized in such movies as Tombstone and Deadwood, but this story takes us back hundreds of years to what might be considered the beginning of the problem, when Europe first started trading with China during the Age of Discovery in the mid-16th century.

Historians and archaeologists believe the cultivation of opium poppies for food, anesthesia and ritual purposes dates back to at least the Neolithic Age (circa 10,000 B.C.). Important medical texts of the ancient world tell us that empires from Samaria to Rome to Arabia all made use of opium, allowing ancient surgeons to perform prolonged procedures.

Widespread medicinal use of opium continued through the American Civil War, before giving way to morphine and its successors, which could be injected at a precisely controlled dosage.

The recreational use of opium in China is believed to have taken hold in the 15th century, but its use was limited by its rarity and expense. However, that began to change in the 17th century when it was mixed with tobacco for smoking, and some speculate that its addictive nature was first recognized then.

In 1729, China outlawed opium but it was too late.

While Europes trade imbalance with China began in the early 1500s, by the 18th century it was out of control. In 1793, Emperor Qianlong (1735-1796) decreed that, China is the center of the world and has everything we could ever need, and that all Chinese products could only be bought with silver.

Being students of world history, April and I know when we see a quote like this, things are about to head south. And thats exactly what happened for his Worshipfulness, Qianlong, the man with all the answers.

With the emperors decree, it became impossible for the British to import the same low-value manufactured consumer products to China that they traded in India and which the average Chinese person could afford to buy.

Britain had been on the gold standard since the 18th century, so it had to purchase silver to supply the Chinese demands. And by the early 1800s, Britain was getting very concerned about its ever-shrinking silver stocks. It had to come up with a commodity that Chinese merchants wanted so badly they would risk imperial wrath to purchase it with silver. That commodity was opium, cultivated at British East India Company plantations in India.

This turned out to be very good for the British, the Chinese merchants who smuggled it into the country and the government officials who were paid to be blind. But the same couldnt be said for the poor addicts!

The smoking of opium quickly spread from the rich to about 90 percent of all Chinese males under 40 years old along the coastal regions. Contemporary estimates tell us that 4 million to 12 million Chinese were addicted to the drug. And for a while, the trade imbalance reversed itself, too.

But soon, the Qing dynastys drug czar, Lin Zexu, reportedly concluded, If we continue to allow this trade to flourish, in a few dozen years we will find ourselves not only with no soldiers to resist the enemy, but also with no money to equip the army.

Thus began the Opium Wars V 1.0 (1839-1842) and V 2.0 (1856-1860) in which the British Empire used its considerable military might and forced China into broader trade agreements and thats how Great Britain got Hong Kong, too.

On March 18, 1840, Thomas Arnold (a British educator and historian) wrote to W.W. Hull: Ordinary wars of conquest are to me far less wicked, than to go to war in order to maintain smuggling, and that smuggling consisting in the introduction of a demoralizing drug, which the government of China wishes to keep out, and which we, for the lucre of gain, want to introduce by force; and in this quarrel are going to burn and slay in the pride of our supposed superiority.

Opium is the dried latex obtained from the opium poppy. It can be eaten or smoked, and it contains codeine and up to 12 percent morphine.

An early form of laudanum, made from opium, was introduced into Western medicine in 1527, as Paracelsus laudanum, by a fellow named Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim his friends called him Paracelsus for short.

The mid-1800s saw chemists and physicians in Europe and the U.S. experimenting with ways to use opium in liquid blends to cure all sort of ailments. Some of the blends were sold in the little opium bottles found in British Columbia.

Numerous pharmaceutical cocktails containing opiates were widely available to the public in the 19th century and were much cheaper than whiskey, since they were medicinal and werent taxed like alcohol.

During the California gold rush, Chinese immigration increased dramatically, and in 1875, San Francisco passed the first anti-drug law in the U.S. (now theres irony!) by banning the smoking of opium in Chinese opium dens, which, of course, just caused the diversion of shipments to Victoria and Vancouver, B.C., where smugglers promptly carried the outlawed drug into the U.S.

And so these bottles, dating to the late 1800s and found in the remains of a small mining town several hundred miles north of Vancouver, are a silent testament to the end of an era, when Great Britain waged a wicked drug war for the lucre of gain, opium was cheaper than whiskey, babies where quieted to death and a lonely miner might have traded his last, hard-won flakes of gold for a few minutes of heavenly bliss, only to awaken more lost and lonely with the dawn.

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Robert Lewis Knecht is a historian and treasure hunter and can be reached at treasure@cannonbeachtreasure.com.