Opium Fiend

by Steven Martin

  Now imagine yourself in a room in old Indochina, reclining alone next to a layout tray upon which rests such a lamp. Your full attention is absorbed by this sculpture in silver and crystal, the centerpiece of a room becoming somber in the waning light of a tropical dusk. Soon the room is completely dark, and all you can see is the warm glow of the opium lamp’s flame upon this meticulously detailed silver dragon. Slowly and meditatively begins the first act of a hedonistic ritual that will last until dawn. Is it any wonder that French citizens in their thousands fell under the trance of la fée brune, “the brown faerie,” as opium came to be called among them?

  Thanks in large part to the British, opium smoking was already common in Indochina when the French began to colonize it. The habit was introduced to Southeast Asia from China, both via Chinese immigrants who settled in ports along the coast of Vietnam, and by tribal peoples such as the Hmong who migrated south into the region’s northern highlands. To ensure that profits from opium smoked in its colonies didn’t go straight into British pockets, France in 1881 established the Opium Regie, a government-controlled monopoly that promoted local poppy farming, imported the raw narcotic from India and China, and oversaw refining and the licensing of opium dens. By 1914, official records show that 37 percent of Indochina’s revenues were coming from the sale of opium. The drug made vast fortunes for the French, but it also tempted the very same colonizers with addiction. Smuggling opium from the colonies back to France was a crime, but smoking the drug was not, and anywhere there was a demand for it, opium was soon to follow. By the turn of the twentieth century, opium-smoking establishments had spread to France, mostly in coastal cities such as Toulon and Marseille and Hyères.

  The French colonials’ love for opium and attachment to their opium accoutrements can be corroborated by the hundreds of pieces of paraphernalia that made it back to the mother country intact—antique opium pipes and lamps that still occasionally turn up at auctions in cities outside of Paris. Some of these pieces were quite obviously crafted by Vietnamese artisans specifically for French smokers. French naval officers are said to have commissioned opium lamps attached to gimbals so that even during the roughest transoceanic crossings, the all-important flame was kept steady and upright, ready to gingerly toast each pill of opium to perfection.

  In fact, French naval officers came to like their opium a little too much. In the late nineteenth century French officers caught smoking it would find their dossiers marked with the initials “F.O.” (fumeur d’opium), scarlet letters that would severely curtail their advancement up the ranks. In 1907, one French officer charged with spying for the Germans blamed his transgressions on his opium addiction. “L’affaire Ullmo,” as it was called, resulted in the accused being found guilty and exiled to Devil’s Island, and the scandal led to official inquiries that concluded that the ranks of the French navy were filled with opium addicts.

  In a New York Times article from April 1913 titled “Opium Degrading the French Navy,” a French admiral decried the fact that even the cadets on French training ships frequented the opium dens of Toulon. Besides her sailors, many of France’s opium smokers were colonists returning from Indochina. Popular memory has it that most of these were the wives of French functionaries and businessmen, driven to smoke by le cafard—depression brought about by the tropical heat and monotony of life far from France. Perhaps because opium was introduced to France not by foreigners, but by the French themselves, it took some time before the authorities felt they had a problem on their hands.

  By the time the famous Hungarian photojournalist Brassaï was capturing his seedy portraits of 1930s Parisian nightlife, the French love affair with the decadent stuff was officially over. In fact, Brassaï's handful of photographs of opium smoking do not show an opium den, but a session at a private home. By then, opium smoking, like the drinking of absinthe, had been banned in France—but not before the drug had left its mark on French culture.

  Beginning in the late nineteenth century, a love for the exotic and a fascination with the Orient made opium smoking a favorite subject of certain French literary figures. Their writings—breathless passages that when translated into English sound alternately profound and ridiculous—are similar to French illustrations of the period in that they unabashedly attempt to exoticize and eroticize opium. Predictably, books with opium themes commonly featured drawings or photos depicting opium pipes posed with Buddha figurines, or opium lamps throwing dramatic shadows upon walls while gently illuminating Asian nudes.

  Charles Baudelaire is the best known of the French writers who experimented with opium in hopes of enhancing their skills, but those who know opium say Baudelaire was a mere dabbler. A handful of French writers and poets were regular opium smokers, and thanks to these few, the French contribution to opium literature is easily the richest. There is the aforementioned Jean Cocteau, of course, and Claude Farrère’s 1904 collection of short stories Fumée d’opium (translated into English under the title Black Opium). Better is the lesser known Louis Laloy, whose 1913 book Le livre de la fumée describes opium smoking in minute detail. Also of note is Georges-Albert Puyou de Pouvourville, who wrote under the Vietnamese nom de plume Nguyen Te Duc. His book Le livre de l’opium has an Orientalist flavor that causes some modern readers to grimace, but nonetheless shows an intimate knowledge of opium’s effects:

  Opium plays a siren’s tune on the piano of his nerves, and as he listens, the smoker forgets about the passage of time, and he also forgets about hunger, thirst, fatigue and sleep.

  However, the most skilled at describing opium’s pleasures in writing was Max Olivier-Lacamp. When his book Le kief (bliss) was published in the 1970s, its opium-sexy imagery is said to have caused a number of elderly reformed smokers—some of whom had not touched a pipe in decades—to abruptly leave their comfortable lives in France and brave a trip back to Asia in search of their old flame.

  For the past decade I have lived in an apartment in Bangkok’s Chinatown, halfway up a building that, in the early 1960s when it was built, was one of the tallest in the city. Its eighteen floors look out over Chinatown to the north and the Chao Phraya River to the west. The location of my apartment, nine floors up, is just about perfect. I’m too high for most mosquitoes yet low enough to be able to make out the faces lining passenger boats that shuttle commuters and tourists up and down the muddy river. Visitors to my place may notice that I have no television. I don’t need one. In the same way that some people leave the TV on for companionship, the sights and sounds of the Chao Phraya River keep me company even when I am not actively taking notice of them.

  My building, said to be the height of comfort and modernity in 1964, is now an eyesore on a stretch of the river whose banks are crowded with international luxury hotels. There is black mold growing on the walls and laundry hanging limply inside cages that enclose balconies. Yet, if I lean out my kitchen window and look downriver, I can see the Royal Orchid Sheraton, the Hilton Millennium, the Bangkok Peninsula, the Oriental Hotel, and, just beyond that, the Shangri-La.

  Western tourists pay hundreds of dollars, sometimes thousands, per night for a penthouse view of the sluggish Chao Phraya River. For me it’s $275 a month, electricity and water not included. In the early evenings I gather my dry laundry from a wire affixed outside my window and hear the booze cruise barges starting their motors so as to be warmed up and out on the river in time for the sunset. Once darkness falls I no longer need to look at the clock—I can tell the time by which songs are being performed on board the party barges as they float up and down the river. Every night some Ricky Martin impersonator with a Filipino accent does “Livin’ la Vida Loca” while going upriver at half past seven and then repeats the song while coming back down around ten. The river’s acoustics are so fine that I can hear cocktail shakers rattling rhythmically and, when a bend in the river causes a barge’s open stern to point in my direction, I can hear the whoops and shouts of Lao-speaking dishwashers playing grab-ass in the scullery.


  Bangkok’s Chinatown is the noisiest section of what is surely one of the noisiest cities in the world. The district where I live has one of those impossibly long Thai names—Samphantha-wong—and is the most densely populated district in all of Bangkok. I live on the northern edge of what a century ago was a riverside village inhabited by Vietnamese Catholics. A couple minutes from my apartment is a late-nineteenth-century cathedral whose Art Nouveau embellishments include crocodile-head gargoyles. Some of the descendants of the original Vietnamese settlers live along the lanes near this old cathedral, and when they leave their front doors open to the street I can see household crucifixes tacked high on interior walls. This is something the casual visitor might not notice. Instead, what catches the tourists’ eye are the heaps of used motor vehicle parts piled up in front of one shophouse after another. My neighborhood makes its money recycling old automobile engines. Some are refurbished and some are broken up for scrap and sold to Pakistani buyers. Here there are transmissions stacked like dead beasts bleeding oil onto the street; over there, man-size piles of greasy cogs sorted by size. All around is the noise of these old engines being broken into small, manageable pieces. I can hear these sounds with startling clarity in my ninth-floor apartment.

  There are other noises—the cries of food vendors. One of my favorites is a vendor of grilled squid who uses a small outboard canoe as his conveyance. There are two boatmen actually, one controlling the boat and the other grilling squid on a small hibachi approximately the size and shape of a one-gallon paint can. They putter along the river’s edge, calling attention to themselves with a horn attached to a bicycle tire pump. When one of them pushes down the pump’s plunger, the horn wails like some forlorn species of goose. These guys are certainly some of the last of the old river-based vendors, of which Bangkok once had thousands.

  Another type of vendor, much more common and no favorite of mine, are farmers who drive pickup trucks filled with a single type of produce, such as oranges or pineapples or rambutans. To let the whole neighborhood know he’s arrived, the farmer parks his vehicle and then, in a voice raspy from use, gives a repetitive monologue about his produce over a loudspeaker. Having your ears blown out by tinny speakers amplifying froggy voices is a very Bangkok experience.

  After dark, the mechanics and vendors have gone home, and the noise abates. By midnight even the party barges have moored, and their drunken revelers have been shuttled back to their hotels by Bangkok’s ubiquitous taxis. This is the best time to take in the view from my apartment. I look out over the rooftops of Chinatown and imagine that out there packed away in some attic or crawlspace under a stairway is the opium pipe of my dreams. Its stem is a solid piece of ivory carved to look like bamboo. The saddle is silver, chased with fluttering bats symbolizing happiness. Its pipe bowl is a chocolate-colored Yixing clay from the kilns of the eponymous city near Shanghai. The entire pipe is covered with the rich patina of age, and all edges have been buffed to a mellow smoothness by the loving caresses of a long-dead owner. It’s out there somewhere, I tell myself. All I have to do is find it.

  In T’ai Yuan-fu, as in Peking, you could buy an opium-smoker’s outfit for next to nothing. Cloisonné pipes, mounted with ivory and jade, were offered at absurd prices.

  —Samuel Merwin, Drugging a Nation (1908)

  Great collectors have great focus. They not only collect, they learn. Many people are simply gatherers, obtaining an example of this and an example of that, getting a euphoric buzz at the moment of acquisition but then losing interest in the object soon after it’s in hand.

  An American friend living in Thailand once told me that every time he went back to the States for a visit, his brother insisted that he bring him an elephant figurine for his “collection.” It didn’t matter to the brother what the figurine looked like, as long as it was an elephant. As my friend told me about this, it was clear that he was annoyed with the task of having to buy elephants for his brother. He explained his irritation this way: “It’s weird. When he sees me, it’s the first thing he asks about: ‘Where’s the elephant? Where’s the elephant?’ ” My friend mimicked his grasping brother, eyes bulging as he waited to see what was brought to him from Thailand. “But as soon as I give him the thing, he looks at it for a few seconds and then puts it on the shelf with all his other elephants and forgets about it. He never mentions it again.”

  This mindless acquiring is common; everybody knows someone who does it. Most of these gatherers are simply enjoying a momentary high by obtaining something new. Like compulsive shoppers, their “collecting” is a form of compulsive behavior; they scratch their itch and then they’re satisfied until they get the itch again. Some of these people go on to build large collections—they may have an example of every Barbie doll ever manufactured, or cover the walls of their homes with antique enameled metal signs advertising every conceivable product—but they rarely do much research about their collectible. Maybe the research has already been done and the findings are already set down in books, so there’s no need. They buy a book and gather and gather and then, once they lose interest or die, their collections are packed away into basements or broken up and sold at garage sales. Perhaps these collectors or their heirs make some money in the process of de-acquisitioning, but no real knowledge has been gained from the exercise.

  Real collectors—as opposed to mere gatherers—become so obsessed with their collectible that they can think of nothing else. They not only need to acquire, they must also know everything about what they are acquiring: every little detail of age and provenance; the story behind every little gouge or crack on its surface. And just knowing about it is not enough. They feel a need to tell others—to educate, to make others appreciate and admire certain objects in the same way they do.

  Explained in this way, my hobbies become a noble cause—there’s no shame in my weird behavior. But deep inside I still wonder. Is what I do no different from the hyperconsumer who tries to keep up with the latest technology? Or perhaps my collecting is just another manifestation of the compulsion that drives some people to obsessively wash their hands? I really don’t know.

  What would have happened to my newest collecting obsession if all the answers were easily found in a large selection of well-researched, -written, and -illustrated books? Would I have become bored with opium-smoking paraphernalia as I had with Southeast Asian textiles? Yes, probably. As it turned out, it took years to educate myself and by the time I had developed an eye, I was thoroughly hooked.

  Using photos from the Arts of Asia magazine articles, I began by scouring the antiques shops of Bangkok for opium pipes and lamps. Bangkok is notorious for being a city where anything can be bought for a price. That reputation may no longer be wholly accurate, but illicit antiquities do occasionally turn up in Bangkok’s antiques shops—although they are unlikely to be openly displayed.

  Bangkok’s first antiques shops began life as pawnshops in a gated section of Chinatown known as Woeng Nakhon Kasem. By the 1980s, a high-end shopping mall specifically for the retailing of antiques had been constructed, and many of the former pawnshops relocated there. The result was River City, a multistory, air-conditioned building filled with shops offering relics from all over Asia, displayed with lighting and sophistication worthy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not surprisingly—this was still Bangkok after all—the new shopping center was not without some intrigue: Now and again plain-clothes police officers would raid shops looking for antiquities looted from ancient sites in Thailand and Cambodia.

  When it came to opium antiques, the offerings in Bangkok were slim, but they whetted my appetite. I also searched neighboring countries for opium paraphernalia when I was working on guidebooks. Of course, I immediately went through the typical amateur collector’s apprenticeship—that is, getting ripped off by the local antiques merchants. However, much of this wasn’t intentional. The merchants seemed genuinely clueless about what I was looking for. I was shown old Chinese water pipes used for tobacco, and the merchants
would swear up and down they were for smoking opium. Long, thin tobacco pipes—the type whose length required a servant to apply a flame to the bowl—and even Middle Eastern hookahs were also being passed off as opium pipes.

  The few opium pipes and lamps I managed to find in Southeast Asia that matched the photographs I had were either modern reproductions or poorly repaired pastiches. It was as if some tinker had gathered the remaining parts of old pipes and lamps and then patched them together with only a vague idea of what they’d originally looked like. I even came to realize that the first opium pipe I bought in Vientiane—my epiphany pipe—was also a modern reproduction. What was going on? How was it that something as quintessentially Asian as an old opium pipe could not be found in Asia? The answer, of course, was simple and obvious: As drug paraphernalia, nearly all opium pipes and lamps in Asia had long ago been destroyed.

  In his book The Changing Chinese (1911), within a chapter titled “The Grapple with the Opium Evil,” author Edward Alsworth Ross told of official campaigns to incinerate opium-smoking accoutrements in the Chinese city of Foochow:

  Eleven burnings have taken place and the pipes, bowls, plates, lamps, and opium boxes sacrificed by fire are upwards of twenty-five thousand. Nothing is spared and no curio seeker need hope to rescue some rare and beautiful pipe by a tempting bid.