ranslation.)
No. 130.
sir.
C. 0.
37173
174
Secretary-General office,
Macao, 25th. June, 1912.
In reference to your letter No. 1525/1912,
His Excellency the Governor directs me to reply as follows:-
1.
The number of balls of Raw Opium, the boiling
of which is allowed to the Concessionaire of Opium in Macao, 18
not extravagant.
The statistical means, which have led you to
$
assume that the mean daily consumption in Kacao corresponds to
two-third chest, do not apply, for such refer to a perfectly ab-
-normal period. At the beginning of 1909 the Opium Contract was
rescinded through failure of payment of rent: since then till the middle of 1910, the boiling of Opium was carried out under the administration of the Government which for such an industry was unprepared; the natural result was that during this period no exportation of prepared Opiun took place, but that, on the contrary, the contraband of opium coming from China and Hongkong increased considerably, reducing to an insignificant quantity the sale of Opium prepared under the administration of the Government. Such a state of things much prejudiced the actual Concessionaire who in the first year of the existence of the contract had to make great efforts to secure export markets and to avoid the contraband of prepared Opium coming from other places contraband which had become a permanent practice.
For these reasons it will be conceived that
calculations based upon statistics of importation for the years 1910 and 1911 would give false results.
2.
The average of consumption, and of exporta- -tion, of Opium in Macao may be computed from the statistics
relating
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