Opium Fiend

by Steven Martin

  Instead of opium antiques being in the obvious places, I came across online auctions for wonderfully opulent examples of opium pipes and lamps in states such as Ohio, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. At first I thought this didn’t make sense—these states had no significant Chinatowns whose inhabitants might have been able to afford impressive smoking equipment. The locales were also far from the railroads, canals, and mines of the American West that were the sites of itinerant camps of Chinese laborers.

  Of course, it was possible that the pipes and lamps I was finding were the forbidden accessories of opium-smoking Americans. The authorities began shutting down opium dens in earnest after the nationwide ban on opium smoking known as the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act was passed in 1909, and many American addicts learned to prepare their own pipes and began secretly nursing their habits at home. I could imagine the great-grandchildren of these old gowsters discovering pipes and lamps boxed away in the attic along with stacks of 78 rpm records and leather-bound photo albums. It even occurred to me that some desperate, meth-addled soul may have come across the instruments of great-granddad’s addiction during a frenzied search for anything that could be consigned to eBay—a sorry cycle that would have made Dr. Kane shake his head with despair.

  One thing that puzzled me, however, was the fact that some of the fanciest pipes that came from these Midwestern states showed no signs of use. They were clean of dross, the black residue by-product of opium smoking whose peculiar smell continues to linger in a pipe a century or more after the last pill was vaporized.

  The mystery was solved when I read an old book written by a Christian missionary in China. The missionaries’ anti-opium stance was welcomed by Qing dynasty officials eager to stop the flow of opium from British India, and so they were given free rein to proselytize. These missionaries, most of whom were American or British, were supported by their congregations in their home countries. In order to raise cash for their efforts, they sometimes journeyed home and went on the lecture circuit, relating tales of their battles against heathen sin to churches packed with gasping parishioners. Opium pipes and lamps made perfect show-and-tell props, and many of these were bought new by the missionaries in China and then brought home—which explains why the paraphernalia was never used. Later—much later—the props were consigned to attics and basements and forgotten … only to be discovered by twenty-first-century descendants hoping to turn their keepsakes into cash.

  Online auctions by sellers in the United Kingdom were another source of opium pipes. Like many of the pipes I was finding in America’s Midwestern states, nearly all the pipes that I sourced in the U.K. had never been used. Some were surely missionaries’ props, and some were no doubt the souvenirs of Britons who had been based in the Far East outposts of the British Empire, such as Singapore and Hong Kong. Still, it struck me as odd that more opium pipes with signs of use weren’t coming out of the U.K. After all, Victorian London, and specifically the Limehouse district, were supposedly centers of opium smoking.

  After a decade of collecting I’ve come to the conclusion that Victorian London’s opium-smoking reputation is nothing more than a myth—albeit a durable one. I base this theory on the fact that I have not once found any photographic evidence of opium smoking in the U.K. True, there are plenty of illustrations, drawings, and etchings, but I have not seen a single photograph. This is in marked contrast to the relatively large number of photos of smokers—people actually smoking opium, not just posing in a studio with the paraphernalia—taken in the United States, France, and even Canada. I have also not been able to unearth any news clippings from the U.K. about opium pipes and paraphernalia being heaped into piles and burned or thrown into incinerators, as was done in America and Asia.

  In 1899, under the heading “Hidden London,” Arthur Morrison—known for his Sherlock Holmes–like detective stories—wrote a nonfiction piece describing the city’s opium smoking scene for the Strand Magazine. Morrison (whose opium-related details leave little doubt in my mind that he knew what he was talking about) admitted that there were only two opium dens in Limehouse whose existence he was sure of, and that one of them was little more than a “show den”—a turn-of-the-century tourist attraction:

  It was the place to which all the inquiring sightseers were taken who insisted on seeing an opium den and were prepared to pay for the privilege. Insomuch that if no smokers happened to be on hand at the time of the visit, it was the custom to send out and bring one or two, while the visitors were delayed in a downstairs room with imaginary objections to their admission. It is said also that it was not always opium that was smoked before visitors, because a man inured to the drug might not be within call, and an attempt by another might end in violent sickness.

  How then do we explain popular legend of Victorian London being cloaked in a fog of opium vapors? Surely the myth began with fictional accounts such as The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) by Charles Dickens, “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (1891) by Arthur Conan Doyle, and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) by Oscar Wilde—all fictional accounts of opium degeneracy that were meant to shock. H. H. Kane ridiculed Dickens’s laughably inaccurate description of opium smoking and intoxication, yet sensationalism—not accuracy—was what readers wanted. By the early twentieth century, stories of a similar ilk were so immensely popular in Britain and America that some were even made into movies. One of these was Broken Blossoms, a silent film starring Lillian Gish. Released in 1919, the picture was based on a short story in Thomas Burke’s 1917 book Limehouse Nights. Supposedly D. W. Griffith made a special trip to London in order to see the Limehouse district—including its opium dens—that he would try to re-create on film. His escort of London policemen searched the neighborhood but was unable to find a single opium den. Ironically, the director could have stayed home and witnessed opium smoking in any of America’s large Chinatowns, including Los Angeles’s old Chinese quarter, just a short distance from Hollywood on the present-day site of Union Station.

  The fiction of widespread opium smoking in Victorian London continues to be passed on to this day. But the durability of the myth is not what’s surprising. After all, how much of what we think we know about history is based on what we’ve read in novels or seen at the movies? Perhaps the real question here is this: Why did opium smoking catch on in France and North America but not in the United Kingdom? A large number of Britons lived in close proximity to the vice due to their Asian colonies, yet according to Arthur Morrison’s article in the Strand Magazine, it was “the rarest thing in the world to see a European” in one of London’s handful of opium dens. Why didn’t more British get hooked abroad, as the French did, and then bring their addictions home? I suspect that the prevailing attitude of the time had a lot to do with it—British ideas of white prestige and nonfraternization with subject peoples were cornerstones of their worldwide empire’s success. No doubt, too, there was a national aversion to sullying oneself with the very poison that Britain used to choke China into economic submission. British botanist Mordecai Cubitt Cooke may have best explained his countrymen’s attitude toward opium in his pioneering book about narcotics, The Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860):

  Opium indulgence is, after all, very un-English, and never has been, nor ever will be, remarkably popular; and if we smoke our pipes of tobacco ourselves … we cannot forbear expressing our astonishment at the Chinese and others who indulge in opium. Pity them we may, perhaps, looking upon them as miserable wretches the while, but they do not obtain our sympathies.

  Whenever one of my online purchases was on its way to Bangkok I felt like a kid the week before Christmas. My apartment building has a small office on the ground floor that doubles as a mail room, and it used to be manned by a smiling young woman who sat at a desk and snacked on slices of green mango. She got so used to me poking my head in the door and asking about parcels that I didn’t have to open my mouth to get an answer. The excitement of receiving a package was always mixed with dread, however, not because the online auction
sellers ever swindled me but because poor wrapping and manhandling sometimes caused pieces to break.

  Before opening, I always gave the parcels a gentle shake, hoping I wouldn’t be greeted by the rattle of loose shards. Then, in the privacy of my apartment, there was restrained frenzy with a knife and pair of scissors, snipping, sawing, and ripping. The layers of cardboard and Bubble Wrap fell away until finally I was holding the object before me. Sometimes my hands trembled so that I would have to immediately put the new piece on the coffee table and then sit back on the sofa and wait until I could handle it safely.

  After some time examining the new object—looking at its surface with a magnifying glass and sniffing for signs of opium use—I got out my camera and photographed it from all angles. Later I would upload the images to my laptop and make notes on when I bought the piece and where it was sourced. If the new item was something very fragile I might rewrap it and store it away, but in most cases my new acquisitions were consigned to a shelf in the living room so I could casually study them over a period of weeks or months.

  I printed out copies of the photos of my newly acquired pieces, and whenever I made my visits to the Bangkok antiques shops, I always took a few of these photos with me to show the merchants. I never told them where I was finding these spectacular opium pipes and lamps—I never admitted that they were coming from Cincinnati, Ohio, and Klamath Falls, Oregon, and Portland, Maine. I certainly didn’t need any competitors at the online auctions, so when the merchants asked, I kept my replies vague. The Thai language has a wonderful built-in ambiguity that allows for this without being rude. The merchants always assumed that one of their competitors had sold me the pieces, and I did nothing to discourage their assumptions.

  When I first began collecting antique opium-smoking paraphernalia it was easy to feel as if I were the only person in the world who collected it. I heard a rumor that French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent had a fabulous collection of opium pipes. His paraphernalia was said to be stored away at a secret location in Morocco—apparently not the sort of collectible that one bragged about.

  It was from the antiques dealers in Bangkok that I first learned there were others looking for opium relics, and not just as an adjunct to a collection of tobacco pipes. After making a few purchases, I was on more friendly terms with a couple of the merchants, and they told me about other Westerners who made more or less regular visits to their shops to ask if there were any opium pipes or lamps in stock. One collector whom all the merchants knew and sold to was a very wealthy German who came to Bangkok annually and bought up most everything related to opium that was on offer. One of the dealers let it slip with a smirk that the German was easily fooled into buying just about anything, no matter how far-fetched the sales pitch. The German was apparently so obsessed with collecting that he would rather be cheated than chance losing out on something important.

  The Bangkok antiques merchants may have admitted that other collectors were looking to buy opium pipes and lamps, but they weren’t exactly keen on having these collectors know one another. On several occasions I tried to coax contact information about my fellow collectors from them, but they always played dumb, giving me a first name and perhaps a nationality but that was about all.

  Then one day I happened to be at one of the upscale shops in the River City mall when a middle-aged European woman, whose deep tan and unlined face suggested a degree of wealth, walked in and greeted the Thai shopkeeper in German-accented English. I was standing before a glass display cabinet with two opium lamps—both unremarkable and overpriced—when I noticed that the woman kept glancing in my direction as she was making small talk with the shopkeeper. I was about to find out why.

  When the woman asked if there was anything new, the shopkeeper’s reply was as brief as it was negative. Although she was smiling and polite, the shopkeeper didn’t seem to be her usual effusive self with this stranger, and this also caught my attention. I might have wandered out of the shop at that point—there was nothing in the display cabinet that I’d not already seen and asked the price of—but by then I was curious. The European woman thanked the shopkeeper and turned away, but instead of leaving the shop she walked up and stood right next to me, looking over the opium lamps. “Do you notice the price tags are always written in some sort of code?” she asked without looking at me.

  “I suppose it’s so the proprietor can size you up and give you a price that fits your wallet,” I replied.

  “Precisely!” she said, now looking at me. “My husband collects these opium objects,” she continued. “He has the greatest collection in the world. Do you know Peter Lee’s book? Those photos are a small sample of things in my husband’s collection. He has so many others. What is shown in the book is nothing.”

  Now she had my full attention. As she began to describe her husband and his collection, I realized he must be the German I’d been told about—the one who was so rich and obsessed that he bought everything in sight. The Thai shopkeeper kept her distance until it was clear that the woman and I were going to have a conversation with or without her help, and then she rushed forward to introduce us. I was surprised to see the German woman’s eyes widen as the shopkeeper pronounced my name. “It’s you!” the woman exclaimed, her eyes flashing. “We have heard many things about you. Every antiques dealer in Bangkok is telling us about the beautiful things you are finding here. My husband very much wants to meet you. He’s here in the mall, somewhere just behind me. He will be here very soon.”

  I have never been much for premonitions. I rarely get them and I even more rarely act upon them, but at that moment there was something inside my head telling me to flee the scene. Partly it was because I could see myself being bullied into taking these people to my nearby apartment to see my collection, but there was something else—something that I could feel but didn’t have the time to think through. I simply did not want this guy anywhere near my collection. I excused myself as politely as I could and made for the door. “Wait!” the German woman called after me, and when I rushed out, calling a hurried “Nice meeting you!” over my shoulder, she, too, made for the door. “I will find my husband—he is here in the mall!” she said, heading toward the escalator in the opposite direction.

  Back at my apartment I had time to sit back and think about what had happened. I took out my copy of Peter Lee’s The Big Smoke and looked at the photographs of the collection of “Helmut P.” I knew from the stories of the merchants and shopkeepers that Helmut P. had for years been passing through Bangkok and other Asian cities to buy up anything he could find. No doubt the antiques merchants of Bangkok had told him about those photocopies I was in the habit of showing around, and from what his wife had said, I knew that Helmut P. assumed I was finding these treasures in Bangkok. How would he react if we met in person? I decided I didn’t want to experience his reaction firsthand.

  An hour later my phone rang, and when I answered it, the pleasant voice of the young woman who worked in my building’s office greeted me. In Thai she told me there was a farang (Western) man enquiring about my apartment number. She described him as a large man—he was standing directly in front of her apparently—and I knew who it had to be. Thinking it very unlikely that he could understand Thai, I told her to tell the man that I was not in. She said she would do this and then hung up.

  The shopkeeper at River City knew that I lived in the apartment building nearby, and surely she had given Helmut P. directions. I doubted he would waste his time coming back to my apartment again, but the following morning I got another call from the woman in the office—again, the man had asked if I was in and was now waiting outside the office door, leaning against a pay phone on the wall. This sounded like something from a Raymond Chandler novel. What was his game? Did he plan to follow me to what he hoped would be my secret cache of opium relics? I wondered how long he could camp out at the building’s entrance—there was no place to sit—without becoming bored or angry.

  I had given some thought to my
initial premonition that this guy should be avoided but could not come up with anything rational except for his connection with that shadowy character Peter Lee. There was no risk of physical danger, of course, but after a decade and a half of living in Thailand the national aversion to confrontation had certainly rubbed off on me. Mostly I think I wanted to avoid him in the same way that we all tend to give a wide berth to people who might be a bit off.

  I waited a couple of hours until hunger for lunch drove me to leave my apartment—without bothering to first call the office to see if Helmut P. was still hanging around. As soon as I reached the ground floor and passed through the elevator doors, I saw him outside the office some ten yards away. He was looking right at me. There was no way to get back into the elevator without being obvious, so I pulled my mobile phone from my pocket and dialed a friend’s number while setting my stride and walking almost straight toward him.

  Luckily, my friend picked up after just a couple of rings and so I was talking on the phone when I strode past my odd stalker. As I walked by, I kept my eyes trained straight ahead, but through my peripheral vision I could see Helmut P.'s face following me as I passed him. He must have been unsure of himself because he made no attempt to accost or tail me. I walked out to the main street and got into a cab, having decided to lunch somewhere outside of my neighborhood. When I arrived back home a few hours later, Helmut P. was nowhere to be seen.

  The following morning I got an early phone call, and in my grogginess I answered without vetting the number. “Hallo?” a German voice said thickly. He wanted to meet me that morning, saying it was his last day in Bangkok. I contemplated lying about my availability but then relented. I would see him as long as he agreed to meet somewhere outside—there was no way I was going to have him in my apartment. We settled on a place near the River City mall, a tiny open-air café up against the north wall of the Sheraton Hotel and next to the Si Phraya pier, where proximity to the river made the heat of the day bearable.