It was after about a year of serious collecting, in the early 2000s, that I discovered a certain website for online auctions was practically awash in antique opium-smoking paraphernalia. On a whim I had done a few searches on eBay to see what would turn up, but I didn’t strike gold in plain sight. Doing a search for “opium” rarely delivered anything authentic.
Instead, I had to be creative with my searches, using words that would reveal auctions by sellers—primarily in America—who had come across genuine opium antiques among their heirlooms but were unaware of what they had found. With an astonishing frequency I found opium pipes online that were simply listed as “Oriental pipe” or “Asian pipe,” or in some cases labeled “Native American peace pipe.” Opium lamps came up even more frequently than pipes. I often found outstanding examples listed as “spirit lamp” or “alcohol lamp” or even “whale oil lamp.” Just as I myself had found almost no visual resources to clarify what was and wasn’t opium paraphernalia, sellers using online auctions were also hindered by the dearth of information—especially on the Internet where these auctioneers were most likely to do their research. The result was that I had the online auctions pretty much all to myself. For the better part of two years I bid on and won scores of century-old pieces of opium paraphernalia at a tiny fraction of what they would have fetched if the sellers had known what they were selling. That solid-ivory opium pipe that I dreamed of finding in Bangkok’s Chinatown turned out to be nestled in a small town in the state of Tennessee. The seller thought it was a peace pipe made of bone and it cost me just over seventy dollars.
I also began to notice patterns. By noting the location that the online sellers were shipping from and by asking them questions about where items were found, I could discern where the best pieces were turning up. America was by far the richest source—not surprising if one was familiar with history.
But first, time to debunk another myth: The Chinese did not bring opium to America. Decades before the arrival of tens of thousands of Chinese sojourners seeking wealth in the California goldfields, Americans were already getting hooked on opium. Laudanum, the opium and alcohol concoction that Thomas De Quincey quaffed in order to quell such nineteenth-century causes of stress as “the absolute tyranny of the violin,” was well known in America. But, like tobacco, alcohol is a poor delivery system for the narcotic—the enervating effects of liquor dull the energizing qualities of opium. Instead, what the Chinese introduced to America was chandu and their own ingenious paraphernalia and technique for vaporizing it.
Judging by numbers alone, there’s a good chance that opium smoking became firmly established in California in 1852, three years into the Gold Rush. That year some twenty thousand Chinese from the environs of Canton, where opium use was prevalent, arrived in San Francisco. Still, it took another twenty years for the habit to catch on with non-Chinese. The first Americans to try opium smoking were probably gamblers, prostitutes, and other underworld figures who frequented the Chinatowns of San Francisco and other settlements in the American West. H. H. Kane, the doctor whose 1882 book Opium-Smoking in America and China warned about the rapid spread of opium smoking among Americans, claimed that the first one to experiment with it was a gambler named Clendenyn who tried the drug in 1868.
Whatever the actual names and dates were, once opium smoking caught on with the general public, it spread like an epidemic, advancing east to St. Louis, Chicago, and New Orleans. Kane estimated that opium smoking arrived in New York City in late 1876 or early 1877. He went on to write of the opium smokers that he interviewed in the dens of Manhattan:
These people, whom I have questioned closely, tell me that there is hardly a town of any size in the East, and none in the West, where there is not a place to smoke and Americans smoking. To be sure in many towns there is no regularly established opium-house, but there is always a Chinese laundry, the backroom of which serves the same purpose.
Dime novel with an opium-den theme. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, opium smoking found its way into Western literature, both highbrow and low. Published by J. S. Ogilvie, New York, 1906. (From the author’s collection)
Jack Black, a former opium addict whose 1926 memoir You Can’t Win gives a detailed account of his life of crime and vagrancy in the United States and Canada during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, claimed that opium was “almost as cheap as tobacco” and that the drug was the medium of exchange at Folsom prison during his time incarcerated there.
In order for modern readers to understand how opium was received in America (and later in Canada), we must put ourselves into the rigidly competitive mindset of people of the day. The races did not mix, not only because it was thought to be degrading to intermingle with people whose culture was considered inferior to one’s own, but because the “survival” of a race and its culture was of paramount importance. Because opium smoking arrived with an alien culture—and especially a non-European one—it was viewed as more of a threat than if it had come with Europeans. Americans, like the Chinese before them, reacted to the spreading vice by blaming the foreigners who had made the drug widely available.
Keep in mind that opium dens came about not because smokers necessarily craved one another’s company (although that, too, would have been a draw), but because preparing an opium pipe was a skill that took much practice. Opium dens were usually run by Chinese, who always had attendants on hand that could be hired by American habitués to prepare pipes for them. China was also the principal source of the chandu and its peculiar paraphernalia. For all these reasons, the drug’s association with Chinese people lingered long after opium became widely smoked among non-Chinese.
A search of the New York Times online archive turns up quite a few local news stories—columns so brief that it’s obvious reports of another “opium joint” being raided in Manhattan’s old Chinatown centered around Mott and Pell streets were not exactly headline news. Here is a typical article from May 1883, a mere paragraph in a “police blotter” column of crime stories from the previous day:
Ah Chung, the Chinaman who kept an opium joint at No. 18 Mott-street, was committed for trial by Justice White in the Tombs Police Court yesterday, and Katie Crowley, the young girl who was found there, was held for further examination. Superintendent Jenkins, of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, promised the Justice that he would look into the matter, but he expressed the opinion that there was “nothing new in it.”
Cities such as San Francisco and New York tried to control the spread of opium smoking by passing ordinances to keep non-Chinese residents from frequenting opium dens in their respective Chinatowns with threats of jail time and fines for both smokers and den proprietors. The new laws were easy to enforce. Cops on the Chinatown beat cast a suspicious eye on any address that was suddenly very popular with non-Chinese visitors. But this diligent enforcement had an unforeseen result: Americans began to open opium dens specifically for American opium smokers beyond the borders of the cities’ Chinatowns. Interestingly, the “Oriental” décor of these new establishments was sometimes described in news stories about the raids that shut them down. Apparently you could take the opium den out of Chinatown, but the American clientele still expected an evening of exotic escapism. Here are the headlines from an August 1899 article in The New York Times about the raiding of a particularly brazen establishment whose opulence warranted bold type and extra ink:
OPIUM SMOKERS ARRESTED
• • •
West Sixty-fourth Street Resort
Raided by the Police.
• • •
A LUXURIOUS ESTABLISHMENT
• • •
Fitted Up in Oriental Style, with Many
Attractions for Smokers, It Did
a Thriving Business.
• • •
And excerpts from the story:
Acting on a warrant … [police] yesterday morning raided an opium smokers’ resort on the top floor of the flat house at 28 Wes
t Sixty-fourth Street. After breaking past the lookout they arrested John C. Ellis, the former proprietor of the “White Elephant,” and thirty-one inmates, including four women.…
The West Sixty-fourth Street place was known as one of the best-patronized and most luxuriously fitted-up establishments of its kind in the city. Ellis, who, when the raid was made, was found deeply under the influence of the drug, and clad in Oriental costume, was not known to the patrons of the place as the proprietor. An undersized youth, answering to the name of “Joe” Cohen, figured as the manager.…
The place was opened only about two weeks ago, and no expense was spared to make it inviting to the smokers. The walls and ceilings were covered with red and gold cloth stamped with fleur-de-lis of gilt, and the corners of the rooms were hung with bright-colored flimsy silks … for the accommodation of smokers who cared to disrobe and wear the pajamas that were distributed.…
“Joe” Cohen was well known and popular among the opium smokers on the west side, and last week when a place on Broadway, between Sixty-sixth and Sixty-seventh Streets, run by a Chinaman called “Boston,” was closed, the known smokers received cards of invitation to the Sixty-fourth Street establishment. The cards bore the name “Harry Hill,” and their possession gave the entrée to the bearer whether he was known or not to Cohen. The place, which could accommodate about fifty smokers at one time, was crowded night and day, and the receipts averaged about $200 [about $5,000 today] every twenty-four hours.
If an inexperienced smoker came well recommended he was admitted, and after paying 50 cents for a card of opium, he received a “layout,” and one of half a dozen “cooks” anxious to prepare the stuff in return for the privilege of smoking some of it would roll pill after pill for him. The layout consisted of a tin tray, a lamp, pipe, and a sponge to clean the bowl of the pipe, and a “yen-hok,” or long piece of steel like a knitting needle, on which to cook the opium. The opium was carefully weighed out by the manager in an ante-room and then delivered on the back of a common playing card. One card sufficed for about twenty pills, and perhaps half a dozen cards would be used by a party of three during a smoking séance of about three hours, after which the smokers would retire and go to sleep. The place did also a good business in cigars, cigarettes, and liquors.
The patronage of the place had grown so large that the front flat on the same floor had been engaged, and the rooms there were being partitioned off for private smoking rooms, where select parties of smokers and sightseers could be accommodated. The addition was to have been ready this week, and every Chinatown guide had been apprised of the proposed opening.
As tame as this news story may seem to us today, opium was the methamphetamine of its day. The public was shocked by tales of just how far users would go to get a fix. If opium smoking had been contained to America’s Chinatowns and underworld communities, it might not have caused much alarm. Instead, as the vice spread to the general public, husbands complained to police about wives who left their homes and children unattended to spend long hours reclining in smoky dens among strangers. When these places were raided, authorities were appalled to find women from “good families” in states of intoxication and partial undress, having discarded their hats, shoes, and corsets to be comfortable while smoking. That’s when Victorian prudishness came into play. The Chinese belief that opium could prolong men’s sexual staying power was perhaps misinterpreted. Americans whispered that the drug was an aphrodisiac that could turn a prim and proper lady into a scissor-legged slattern. H. H. Kane fretted that the scofflaw attitude of Americans in general drew them into the opium dens:
The very fact that opium-smoking was a practice forbidden by law seemed to lead many who would not otherwise have indulged to seek out the low dens and patronize them, while the regular smokers found additional pleasure in continuing that about which there was a spice of danger. It seemed to add zest to their enjoyment.… Each new convert seemed to take a morbid delight in converting others, and thus the standing army was daily swelled by recruits.
Historical photographs confirm the popularity of opium with America’s non-Chinese population. Photos of white smokers are relatively common, and social reformer Jacob Riis captured an image of an African American man smoking in a Manhattan den and included it in his groundbreaking series of photographs documenting New York City’s poor. As authorities took to raiding opium dens across America, people of all races—Caucasians, African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans, as well as Chinese—were caught in the act of smoking together. Knowing what we do about the bigotry of nineteenth-century Americans, is it any surprise that society was horrified by opium? Here was a drug that encouraged the mingling of different classes and races! In her book about drug use in Canada, The Black Candle (1922), Judge Emily F. Murphy remarked:
A man or woman who becomes an [opium] addict seeks the company of those who use the drug, and avoids those of their own social status. This explains the amazing phenomenon of an educated gentlewoman, reared in a refined atmosphere, consorting with the lowest classes of yellow and black men.
In San Francisco in the 1870s, an Irish immigrant named Denis Kearney led a disgruntled following of primarily Irish laborers who were competing with the Chinese for jobs in the building of railroads and other grand nineteenth-century projects. In time Kearney and his followers, known as the Working-men’s Party, were able to use anti-opium hysteria to whip up sentiments that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—a series of laws that tightly curtailed Chinese immigration to the United States. These laws were left on the books until World War II, when America and China found a common enemy in Japan, and the anti-Chinese acts were revoked.
The irony of one foreign-born group telling another that it wasn’t American enough to stay on American soil was not lost on some commentators of the day. A political cartoon titled “At Frisco” that appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1880 depicted Kearney as a thuggish leprechaun wielding a club and, in a thick Irish brogue, telling a rattled-looking Chinese that in “the words of George O’Washington and Dan’l O’Webster in regarrd to Furrin Inflooince, ye must go. D’ye understand? Ye must go!”
Right or wrong, the association of opium smoking with the Chinese stuck. Americans adopted Cantonese terms to describe opium smoking, opium paraphernalia, and states of opium intoxication and withdrawal. Got a “yen” for something? The term originally meant a craving for opium. Slang words and terms that associated opium with the Chinese found their way into everyday use via pulp literature and the lyrics of popular songs, first ragtime and then jazz and the blues. Opium smoking may have been on the decline in America by 1931 when Cab Calloway sang about Smokey Joe going to Chinatown to look for his girl Minnie, who “gets her pleasure kicking the gong around,” but listeners didn’t have to be told that Minnie was an opium smoker. The slang term “kick the gong,” meaning to smoke opium, had long been in use, and would be referred to again in songs by artists such as Slim & Slam and Hoagy Carmichael.
Opium smokers in a tenement in Manhattan circa 1910. In New York and other North American cities, the vice spread beyond the borders of Chinatown and caught on with locals and immigrants of all ethnicities. (From the author’s collection)
Even cartoons for American children produced all the way into the 1930s—the fare of Saturday matinees—featured the obligatory opium-smoking scene whenever a Chinatown theme was employed. Terrytoons Studios’ cartoon short Chop Suey from 1930 is a typical example. Using San Francisco’s Chinatown as a setting, it depicts two mice in Chinese attire and pigtails whispering about their “yen” through a peephole in the door of a Chinese laundry and then being handed two opium pipes by the proprietor—a cat, also in Chinese attire. The mice take a couple pulls on their pipes (erroneously without the use of lamps) and then go floating away on the clouds.
An unfortunate result of these cultural remnants of opium smoking is that however forgotten (or misremembered) the vice may be in the minds of the modern-day general public, some Chine
se Americans are likely to be irked by what they feel is a negative stereotype. On the other hand, many non-Chinese Americans seem to view historic opium smoking not in a negative light, but as something alluringly romantic. Both views lack nuance, and once again, the reason that Americans of any ethnicity are able to think of opium smoking in such simplistic terms is because the habit has so completely disappeared from our lives.
The fact is, if your ancestors lived in an urban setting in America or Canada between 80 and 150 years ago, there’s a good chance they witnessed opium smoking—or at least saw its effects—firsthand. Here is a paragraph from Jack Black’s memoir describing how common opium smoking was in San Francisco around 1900:
The night life fascinated me. Grant Avenue, now filled with the best shops, was a part of the Tenderloin, and all the narrow streets or alleys off it were crowded with cribs and small saloons with a dance floor in the back room. Many of them had only the short, swinging doors, and never closed from one year’s end to another. The Tenderloin was saturated with opium. The fumes of it, streaming out of the Baltimore House at the corner of Bush and Grant, struck the nostrils blocks away. Every room in it was tenanted by hop smokers. The police did not molest them. The landlord asked only that they pay their rent promptly.
As a collector, coming across a tract like this in a memoir was for me as exciting as discovering an unrecognized opium relic on a dusty shelf in an antiques shop. Yet such histories can be deceiving. One would think that San Francisco, once a center of opium smoking in the United States, would be ankle-deep in opium-smoking relics. At one time it almost certainly was, but as I had discovered in Bangkok, that was before the bonfires of the eradication campaigns had consumed them. Nowadays, most anything found on the shelves of San Francisco’s antiques shops (and believe me, I made several trips to Grant Avenue to explore) had come recently from China and was usually a reproduction.
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