Although tobacco was consumed in China as early as the 1500s, cigarettes didn't arrive until the late 1800s, according to the archives at the US's Duke University, immediately after the invention of the cigarette machine in 1881, James B. Duke (1865—1925) is reported to have leafed through a world atlas to survey the population of foreign countries. Coming to the figure 430,000,000, he exclaimed, "That is where we are going to sell cigarettes." The country was China, and in 1890 the Dukes exported the first cigarettes to the populous Asian nation.

British-American Tobacco Company Limited is among the first batch of firms that introduced cigarettes to China. Its factory in the Pudong district of Shanghai by 1919 was producing more than 243 million cigarettes per week.[Photo/tobaccochina.com]