The greatviet encyclopaedist Le Quy Don condemned it as an evil barbarian introduction, in contrast to civilized tea, but complained that officials, ordinary people, wives, and unmarried girls even went without food their passion to smoke it, despite a ban by the Da Viet court cited Woodside 1997, 258) Tobacco was seen as having relaxing effects similar to betel but more powerful. Beginning in the eighteenth century it was added in small amounts to the betel quid and chewed as a more economica means of gaining a stronger effect
If betel was the great facilitator of male-female relations, the twentieth cen ury cigarette became in its place one of the key modern markers of the gender boundary. The increasing power of modern fashions rendered betel chewing increasingly unacceptable. European males in Asia had abandoned the hab before 1800 in favor of the cigars being produced in Manila. By 1900 saw spitting betel-juice in a public place as the epitome of the dirty native habits of the East, their prejudices bolstered by the new bacteriological theories. The Asian elites who dealt extensively with Europeans quickly sensed this scorn and adopted instead the European fashion of handing around Manila cigars. Manila cigarettes became fashionable among Southeast Asian in the swiftly following the new European fashion, and their affordability made it possible for the new urbanites to smoke them. Modern schooling became coterminous with the abandonment of betel chewing on a mass level. So eager was ai nationalist dictatorship of Phi Songkhram to enforce civilized" modernity that it declared the chewing of betel illegal in 1940
Apart from the chic cigars and cigarettes of Manila, designed for export there was much local production of home-made cigarette with an image almost as rustic as betel itself. The Malay term was simply "bundle" (bungkus), since all kinds of aromatic or sweet additives could be put in the commercialized with tobacco, not unlike the betel quid itself. These became of Kudus began in Java from the 1880s, once the entrepreneurs to open small factories local women operated This production for the market used a formula of ingredients played the major part alongside tobacco. The way they crackled in which cloves when smoked caused them to be called kretek, onomatopoeically. These were cheap and popular, but not at first seen as modern. Only after British American Tobacco (BAT) opened a cigarette factory in Cirebon in 1924 did the Kudus manufacturers modernize their production in competition. They produced a trimmer cigarette and advertised it as modern, with the result that output increased tenfold in the 1920s. In 1939 the kretek industry was already a Java manufacturing success story, producing about ten billion cigarettes a year and employing 80,000 women to roll them. In the 1970s production expanded and became more mechanized, and by 2000 Indonesia was producing 200 billion kretek cigarette a year as against 25 billion of "white" or international style cigarettes. The importance of this lobby and source of tax revenue helps explain why Indonesia remains one of the few countries not to have signed the World Health Organization convention to limit smoking