A Hong Kong–based magazine called Arts of Asia ran three short illustrated articles pertaining to opium-smoking paraphernalia during the 1990s. I obtained back issues of two of these, one with an article about opium pipes and another about opium lamps. The latter article was quite good. I was impressed by the author’s having taken the time to scout out some intriguing tidbits—such as discovering a Chinese general store in Manhattan’s Chinatown that sold opium lamps all the way into the late 1970s. According to the article, the Chinese merchant pretended to have no idea what this unlabeled inventory was used for. The opium lamps illustrated in the piece belonged to the author, and it was obvious that he had spent much time trying to ascertain the function of each and every component of his complex little lamps.
Arts of Asia seems to rely heavily on self-made experts to supply the magazine’s articles, and, as in the case of the piece about opium lamps, this can be a boon when collectors who might otherwise have difficulty getting published are able to share their knowledge. On the other hand, the Arts of Asia piece about opium pipes was an example of what happens when an author who knows very little about a subject has his words published. It would take me years to separate the facts from the misinformation conveyed in this article. The piece did have one exceptional saving grace, though: It was liberally illustrated with photographs of opium pipes and paraphernalia from the collection of one Trevor Barton.
I would later learn that, like the author of the article, Barton was primarily a collector of tobacco pipes—an established collectible with thousands of devotees in Europe and North America. As you might guess, the vast majority of tobacco pipe collectors are older men, and many of them have been at their hobby for decades. Trevor Barton was typical. Over time I was also able to learn that he had been gathering tobacco pipes from all over the world since the 1940s. An Englishman, he earned his living as a manager for a firm that sold natural gas equipment, a job that kept him traveling and gave him access to antiques shops and flea markets on four continents. Most serious collectors of tobacco pipes have at least one example of an opium pipe among their hoard; an outlaw curiosity amid the law-abiding calabashes and meerschaums; something sure to resurrect the conversation after sips of single malts and puffs on favorite briars have made old men quiet and contemplative. Trevor Barton, however, was different from the usual tobacco pipe collector in that he was not content to garnish his collection with a single opium pipe. He had many examples, and their photographs in the Arts of Asia article were a revelation to me.
I had already found and read shrill Victorian-era essays against smoking opium, written at a time when the habit was common yet believed to be the wickedest vice known to man. Almost none of these old tracts were illustrated with opium paraphernalia. It was as though the implements of opium smoking were unworthy of mention—deadly tools that were better left unseen. But there was nothing ominous looking about the pipes in Trevor Barton’s collection. Their carnival-like adornment in polychrome porcelain, multicolored enamel, and bejeweled silver seemed meant to garner attention with a promise of hedonistic celebration. I was fascinated by these most colorful and ornate examples of opium paraphernalia and needed to learn more.
A few months after reading this pair of articles, a trip to the bathroom led me to an unlikely source of information—an article in Vanity Fair. For years in Thailand I had been living on tourist visas, exiting the country every three months to visit a Thai embassy abroad and obtain a fresh visa. The trips were something of a hassle, but having to leave Thailand regularly kept me from getting too lazy, and it was a great way to see firsthand how things were changing in the region. Often I took notes and turned them into articles that I could sell to magazines or the wire services, and in doing so I could recoup the cost of the journeys. Any neighboring country would do, but Cambodia in the late 1990s and early 2000s was my visa-run destination of choice because a good friend had taken a job running the Phnom Penh bureau of Agence France-Presse.
Dan had a spacious flat in a French colonial-era building overlooking the confluence of the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers. His verandah alone was half the size of my Bangkok apartment, and the famed Foreign Correspondents Club of Cambodia—at the time my favorite restaurant in all of Southeast Asia—was just around the corner. At “The F,” as the restaurant was known to expats, I typically had an unhurried breakfast before excusing myself to the privacy of Dan’s nearby bathroom for a mid-morning respite. It wasn’t that the restaurant’s restrooms were unclean. In some ways the men’s room was as atmospheric as the rest of the establishment (felt-tip pen graffiti: WHO THE HELL IS AL ROCKOFF?), but it was also as busy as the rest of the establishment. Going back to Dan’s was a way to break up the morning, and I knew that when I returned to my table at the restaurant everything would be just as I had left it—the waiters knew my routine.
As it happened, the aforementioned issue of Vanity Fair was doing duty as potty fodder in Dan’s bathroom. Leafing through the table of contents of the magazine, my eyes rested on a piece titled “Confessions of an Opium-Seeker” by author Nick Tosches. I scanned the article for illustrations and then took the magazine back to the restaurant and began reading it there, parking myself in an oversized planter’s chair beneath the caressing breezes of an ancient ceiling fan. When the Sunday brunch crowd became too boisterous, I paid the check in dollars, received my change in riel, and then spent the rest of the morning reading on Dan’s verandah.
When an outsider covers territory with which I’m on intimate terms, it’s often a recipe for disappointment. I know what’s real and what’s just colorful prose, so when authors overly embellish surroundings that I know well, I feel as though some dilettante stranger has buttonholed me at a party and made extravagant and doubtful claims about a close friend. Parts of “Confessions of an Opium-Seeker” made me feel this way once the author’s narrative took him to Southeast Asia and he began describing settings I knew well. On the other hand, I could easily relate to the hunger to experience the old Orient that seemed to have driven the journey.
Tosches searched the capitals of Southeast Asia looking not just for opium but for an opium den. He claimed diabetes had driven him to seek out opium, but he also insisted on having his medicine administered in exotic surroundings. His search led him through places that he felt were likely to still have opium dens: Hong Kong, Bangkok, Phnom Penh. Of course, the drug was available in the region’s boondocks. In northern Thailand and Laos, backpacking tourists went on organized “treks” to mountain villages inhabited by ethnicities such as the Hmong, and a pipe or two of opium was almost invariably a part of the package.
Tosches, however, wanted the experience of an urban opium den—an establishment specifically for opium smoking, not the rural hut of some tribal highlander who happened to be an opium smoker. He wanted a place of sophistication where any member of the public might enter and recline and be served opium by an attendant who could masterfully prepare the narcotic before his eyes and wield the pipe with a flourish. He yearned for the charm and decadence of the old Orient, but no such place seemed to exist—all had been closed long ago. All but one apparently, and once the author found it, this opium den that ended his quest was lovingly described but vaguely located. I read this and felt that Tosches must have made a promise not to reveal the den’s location. A year or so later, his expanded Vanity Fair article was published as a seventy-two-page book called The Last Opium Den.
I knew where the opium den was. At the time the article was written there was only one city in Southeast Asia where such an establishment still existed. I might have finished the article and then forgotten about it, but upon doing some online research about Tosches I read that his Vanity Fair piece had supposedly received more positive feedback than any previous article in the magazine’s history. Apparently I wasn’t the only one interested in opium. I gave the story a second read.
One thing that caught my attention was the prominent mention of a book about opium smoking by a writer cal
led Peter Lee. I made a note of it and began looking for a copy. Finding it took some time. Coincidentally, the book had been published in Thailand, but I could find almost no information about the publisher or the book on the Internet. Thinking that the author might be living in Thailand, I put my full attention toward obtaining a copy, and when I finally found one, The Big Smoke turned out to be one of the strangest self-published books I had ever read. The book’s title was lifted from an article written for The New Yorker in 1969 by the American author and adventuress Emily Hahn. In it she told about her experiences with opium in 1930s Shanghai. Peter Lee’s The Big Smoke did not describe the author’s long-past experiences with opium as had Emily Hahn’s excellent New Yorker piece. Instead, it was a modern how-to book for would-be opium smokers.
Peter Lee’s The Big Smoke boasted detailed descriptions of opium smoking and even photos of some of the steps necessary to prepare the pipe. Opium was, according to the author, a miracle cure-all for modern society’s woes. Paradoxically, he then went on to describe opium addiction in tones so sober that I felt he must have experienced withdrawal firsthand. He also offered a list of remedies for addiction. Some of them, including the “Clear Light, or universal free energy” method, sounded questionable to me. This cure could be performed only by a certain San Francisco spiritualist who would put the opium addict into a trance and then order the narcotic to “return to the cosmos for recycling.” Withdrawal via this method was said to be fast and painless, but there was no name or contact information for the one person the author claimed could perform it.
The author’s bio said he was a Chinese educated in America, but after reading the book I felt that something was off. There were quotes from famous opium smokers such as Emily Hahn and the French writer Jean Cocteau, but when I found and read these quotes in their original publications, it seemed that their highly selective use in Peter Lee’s book was an attempt on the author’s part to show opium smoking only in the most favorable light. Who was this guy?
The book’s New-Agey tone sounded very American to me, as did the author when he sometimes dropped the spirit-healer persona for that of the outraged conspiracy theorist. There were rants about the U.S. federal government’s antidrug policies as well as diatribes against pharmaceutical conglomerates whose greed and failure to somehow eliminate opium’s addictive properties kept it from being a natural alternative to synthetic drugs. When I contacted the author with questions regarding some photographs of opium paraphernalia illustrated in his book, he admitted that he did not collect antique paraphernalia beyond what he needed to smoke opium at home, and that his own layout did not contain any antique pieces other than his pipe and lamp. But in the back of the book he did include a selection of color photos of genuinely old paraphernalia belonging to a German collector. Peter Lee told me that this collector was not easy to contact. Credits on the photo captions did not disclose his full name—here I shall call him “Helmut P.”—and gave no other information about him.
Over a few weeks Peter Lee and I exchanged a handful of emails. The man was an odd mix of characteristics. He was a booster for opium smoking and proud of his knowledge (he sometimes followed bits of information with “Remember where you heard that”), but he also seemed to understand that promoting the use of a drug that was illegal in just about every country on earth might get him into serious trouble. I got the feeling that whoever this guy was, he was of two minds: hiding behind a pen name and fictitious biography and yet wanting to be the Timothy Leary of opium.
I decided to cut things off. I had gotten little information about opium paraphernalia that I hadn’t already figured out myself, and Peter Lee kept pressing me to look for and sell functional pipes and lamps to him—something I didn’t care to do. Instead, I made a gift of a small brass opium lamp that I had bought at an antiques shop in Bangkok and mailed it to the author at his home in a country outside continental Asia. My aim was to break things off in a polite way but also to be remembered if in the future I needed to get in touch again. Peter Lee was pleased with my offering and rewarded me with the name and phone number of somebody living in Southeast Asia who he claimed could teach me more about antique paraphernalia.
I was put off by my brief dealings with Peter Lee, however, and something told me to steer clear of him. I had come to the conclusion that his book was an attempt to garner widespread interest in opium smoking, the wished-for result being increased supply to meet increased demand. To go to such lengths in hopes of seeing opium become as cheap and ubiquitous as it had been in the nineteenth century struck me as reckless. My own experimentation with opium had, up until that point, been largely agreeable. I wasn’t convinced that all the historical warnings against the narcotic were accurate—indeed, I thought that much of the early writings about opium’s dangers were exaggerated. Yet I still had a healthy respect for the drug’s alleged risks, and if I were suddenly to find that for some reason I could never again smoke opium, I would not have shed any tears.
After breaking off my correspondence with Peter Lee, I cast aside and almost lost the contact information for that supposedly knowledgeable source that he had given me. When, months later, I remembered the contact and finally made the effort to seek out and meet the man, he not only turned out to be a very important source of information about the effects of high-quality opium, but he also became a very good friend.
I spent hours looking at the photographs in the opium-related articles from Arts of Asia magazine. I did the same with the how-to book, memorizing the details in the photos of Helmut P.'s collection. I heard about a museum catalog from an exhibition that was held at the Stanford University Museum in 1979. The exhibition was mostly put together from the collection of a professor named Ralph Spiegl. During a visit to San Francisco, I persuaded a friend to drive me to the museum where I was able to get a copy of the catalog as well as see a handful of opium pipes that were in the permanent collection. The catalog’s illustrations were small and the descriptions of the pipes on display were brief, but at least I was able to glean some information by comparing the dimensions of each pipe. It seemed the average opium pipe was an astonishing twenty-two inches long.
Emily Hahn’s story in The New Yorker was charming, but there were no illustrations and little description of the paraphernalia she and her friends used. Jean Cocteau’s Opium: Journal d’une désintoxication (Opium: Diary of a Cure) from 1930 was illustrated with Cocteau’s own line drawings—edgy self-portraits of the author suffering through detox—but again, there was almost no description of opium paraphernalia.
In 1882, a New York doctor published a book called Opium-Smoking in America and China. Claiming to have spent years in the opium dens of Manhattan, Dr. H. H. Kane wanted to cure opium addiction, and his book was a warning to American readers about how quickly the vice of opium smoking was spreading. Kane described the smoking process in detail, and his book featured a single engraving of a typical opium pipe, opium lamp, and other requisite opium-smoking accoutrements.
Besides these publications and a handful of magazine articles, there was nothing—at least not in English. It seemed that almost nobody had written in detail about opium paraphernalia—even during the heyday of opium smoking. Much, of course, had been written about the scourge of opium addiction, but nobody had bothered to describe the instruments or the rituals of that addiction. At the time I couldn’t figure out why, but after I began learning about opium’s more recent history, the reason for the dearth of reliable information became rather obvious.
Before explaining why the culture of opium has been so thoroughly forgotten, I should dispel a commonly held modern misconception: Opium was not introduced to China by the British. Fans of simplified versions of history with clear-cut heroes and villains (as well as modern Chinese propagandists) may be distressed by this politically charged truth, but for the rest of us this is good news—the real history of opium in China is much more complex and, as a result, infinitely more interesting.
Opium a
rrived in China around the seventh century via Arab traders, whose opium-laden camels traveled east over the fabled Silk Road. The Arabic connection is most evident in the Chinese word for opium, yapian, which is probably a corruption of the Arabic word for opium, afiyun. The Arabic word was, in turn, based on Afyon, the name of a province in what is now modern-day Turkey, where the Arabs believed opium originated.
Following the narcotic’s arrival in China from the west, hundreds of years passed and opium assumed a place among thousands of drugs—some indigenous, some imported—that made up the prodigious Chinese pharmacopoeia. Li Shizhen, the father of Chinese herbal medicine, described opium in the sixteenth century, noting the narcotic’s ability to cure diarrhea and trumpeting its benefits as an aphrodisiac. This reputed attribute would greatly enhance opium’s desirability in China and other parts of Asia but paradoxically would also stigmatize the drug once it arrived in America.
As an assumed aphrodisiac, opium gained popularity in Chinese society and by the mid-Ming dynasty (approximately 1450 to 1550) opium was worth its weight in gold. China began to demand that semi-vassal states such as Siam provide opium as a tribute item along with luxury goods such as elephant ivory and rhinoceros horn. Yet the magical substance was not without its drawbacks. Addiction was a known risk, but most users managed to avoid it due to the simple fact that opium was very rare and costly.
As in other regions of the world where opium was known, the Chinese method of ingestion was eating. If eaten frequently, raw opium wreaks havoc on the gastrointestinal system, causing severe constipation. The same side effect that made opium an effective treatment for diarrhea kept it from being enjoyed too often as an aphrodisiac. Then, sometime in the early seventeenth century—exact dates are impossible to know at this point—the Chinese began smoking opium recreationally.
Early attempts at smoking opium should not be confused with the classic opium-smoking experience that evolved from it. Because raw opium is a sticky goo difficult to ignite and burn, the narcotic had to be mixed with tobacco in order to be smoked. While consuming opium in this way was somewhat easier on the digestive system, it was still problematic. Burning opium produced an acrid gray smoke that caused the smoker to choke and coated his or her teeth with an oily black residue.
Opium Fiend Page 6
