Over the next few years that is precisely what we did. Our goal was to put together a layout tray with all the requisite pieces that, when finished, would comprise dozens of rare items crafted specifically to assist in the ingestion of opium. It would be a complete layout the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the People’s Liberation Army marched into Shanghai. The pieces of paraphernalia would, of course, have to match, and that was the real challenge: to find accoutrements that matched as closely as possible and assemble them into a stunning whole.
Visiting Willi once a month, I would take the night train from Bangkok and disembark in the cool of the morning, transferring to a bus in order to cross the bridge over the Mekong River into Laos. With each trip I brought with me a rare piece of antique opium paraphernalia, having spent the time between visits feverishly seeking the next piece. My research would begin with my photo archive—a part of which was devoted to historical photographs of opium smokers.
Images of people smoking opium are not exactly plentiful. By the time photography was invented there was a social stigma attached to the vice even in those places where the drug was not illegal. The photographs that do exist can be divided into two groups: people smoking opium and people simply posing and pretending to smoke. As usually happens in life, the posers were easier to find, but fortunately they were also very useful to me.
With the boom in popularity of postcards in the early 1900s, photographers began looking for subjects that would sell. In places where opium was known to be smoked, a postcard depicting the act was a popular souvenir with visitors. China was, of course, known for its prodigious opium consumption, but going into an opium den or the smoking room of a private residence and taking a photograph was usually out of the question.
To solve the matter, photographers in cities such as Hong Kong and Shanghai re-created such scenes in their own studios, complete with layout trays and at least two smokers posing on either side. Sometimes the scene included an elaborate set of hardwood furniture—including an opium bed, a pair of stools, and perhaps a chair or two—and a party of Chinese onlookers waiting their turn at the pipe. Despite the fact that the subjects were merely going through the motions, the images were important to me for the lavish paraphernalia on display. If I scanned and enlarged the images I could sometimes obtain a clear view of complete opium layouts with all the accoutrements beautifully arranged in the symmetrical way that was so popular among the Chinese.
Photos of people actually smoking opium are rare—especially those captured in China. More common are photographs of people indulging in the vice in French Indochina and the United States. Some of the postcard images from France’s Southeast Asian colony look to have been taken in studios, albeit with smokers actually in the act of smoking. Others are in rustic settings that suggest the photographers searched villages or the “native quarters” of towns until they found a smoker willing to pose with his layout.
In San Francisco’s Chinatown there were dozens of photographs taken, including a handful of images that were reproduced thousands of times on postcards. These, too, look as though the subjects were actually smoking, and there are even photos dating to the late nineteenth century that seem to have been taken on the sly—the photographer sneaking into a dimly lit opium den before tripping the shutter, igniting the flash powder, and then fleeing the scene.
While these more genuine depictions are probably more important historically, most were of little use to me because the smokers captured were poor and had paraphernalia that reflected their poverty. As in China, it would have been all but impossible for a photographer to gain access to an upscale opium den or a private smoking room in San Francisco’s Chinatown. A notable exception that I found and was able to study was a unique portrait taken in 1886 by famed California photographer I. W. Taber. The photo shows two Chinese men smoking opium in what looks to be a lavish room just for that purpose, complete with an ornately carved hardwood opium bed and a layout tray inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
So with the help of my selection of photos, all scanned, enlarged, and cropped, I made a list of what pieces of paraphernalia I would need and then set out to find them. In searching for these tools I had even more of a challenge than I did in looking for opium pipes and lamps. Because the uses of most of the smaller pieces of paraphernalia had been long forgotten, antiques dealers—even the ones who sold the occasional opium pipe or lamp—never carried them in their shops. Merchants are wary of buying something they might have trouble reselling, and knowing nothing about an item is good reason not to invest in it. I showed pictures to the shopkeepers in Bangkok, all of whom got their antiques from hunters roving around China and Southeast Asia. None showed much enthusiasm for passing on a search order to their hunters. I couldn’t really blame them—I was the only customer interested, and if by chance the hunters brought back some item that I didn’t want, the antiques dealers would likely be stuck with it.
Opium smokers in an opulent private smoking room in San Francisco’s Chinatown, photographed by I. W. Taber in 1886. These men are reclining on a “bed” especially made for the purpose of opium smoking. (Courtesy of the California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento, California)
The online auction sites were my next stop. There I found much the same problem that I had with the Bangkok antiques shops—how would a seller list something if he or she didn’t know what it was? Adopting the tactic I had used to find antique opium pipes and lamps on eBay, I thought up a series of searches designed to ferret out any opium paraphernalia that had been misidentified.
My success was limited, but I did manage to find a bowl scraper with a water-buffalo horn handle and iron blade (in Chicago, listed as a “Japanese tool”), a pewter dross box with an openwork brass lid that spelled out the characters for “double happiness” (in Washington State, listed as a “cricket cage”), and a paktong needle rest in the likeness of one of the auspicious Hoho Twins reclining on his belly (in California, listed as a “chopstick rest”).
The problem was that my searches were time consuming, and they turned up maybe one piece of arcane paraphernalia a month. It was a slow way to build a collection—especially since I wanted accoutrements that matched as closely as possible so that the finished layout would look as though each piece had been crafted specifically for it. I needed a better system.
By chance while doing my online searches I ran across a seller based in Beijing who had an opium-needle cleaner on offer but didn’t know what it was, labeling it a “scholar tool.” I decided to email him with a wish list in the hopes that he could find other pieces of paraphernalia to sell me.
It was a calculated risk. I had already tried this approach with dealers in China and gotten less than satisfactory results. Once, I spent a week getting to know a merchant in Hong Kong via email who had listed an opium lamp on eBay. He said he was open to looking for more lamps for me, and I emailed him photographs of lamps from my collection to educate him about how opium lamps differed from other types of oil lamps. The merchant soon began to find opium lamps, but the prices he attached to them for resale were way beyond my means. I managed to haggle his prices down a bit and bought the best ones.
The merchant then asked me to be patient and said he would contact his dealer friends on the mainland to see if they could source more opium lamps. I thought I might start acquiring some decent items through this network, but when the merchant finally emailed photos of opium lamps he claimed to have found in China, I was surprised to see that they were all fakes whose designs were based on my own lamps—the ones in the photos I had sent him. It had taken the Hong Kong merchant mere weeks to have the reproductions made, and although I had managed to spot them, they were very good fakes. The thought was frightening.
The experience was an education, and I was to learn over time that antiques merchants in China are a particularly shrewd breed. My dealings with them seemed to follow a familiar arc: I would buy a couple of items from a merchant, and he or she would, in
turn, look for more to sell me. Because there were so few authentic opium artifacts out there, the pickings soon got slim and the merchant looked for ways to cheat, substituting pastiches or out-and-out fakes. Once this began to happen, it was time to look for a new dealer.
Despite the hassles, it made sense that China would be the best place to look for the lesser-known bits of paraphernalia that I would need to build a complete working layout. More people had smoked opium there, percentage-wise and in sheer numbers, than anywhere else in the world, and the huge quantity of paraphernalia once in use there surely meant that many of these items would have escaped the bonfires of the eradication campaigns. It also stood to reason that officials in charge would have focused on destroying the easily recognizable opium pipes and lamps, and that the esoteric tools I was looking for were more likely to have survived.
Traveling to China to hunt for paraphernalia might seem like a logical move, but I knew from my forays in the antiques shops in the cities of Southeast Asia—the vast majority of which are owned by ethnic Chinese—that antiques hunting in China would be a slog, and a really expensive one at that. Shopping for Chinese antiques is a ritualized process, and not being Chinese is a distinct disadvantage. Most antiques merchants there are older men who have been in the business for years and consider themselves experts in their field. The thought that a non-Chinese might be able to discern or even appreciate the finer points of their art is laughable to them. Too many tourists have walked into their shops and balked at the prices of their treasures; too many others have allowed themselves to be fleeced. So it should come as no surprise that a non-Chinese customer walking in for the first time will be shown the worst items on offer, not the best. To get past this takes time. Assuming the proprietor will talk to you (I have set foot in Chinese antiques shops and been pointedly ignored), you must convince him that you are worthy of his time. Dress is important. The instant you walk in he will look you over and decide whether you are worth talking to. His ultimate goal is to make lots of money, and if you dress as though you have little, the proprietor will treat you accordingly.
If you manage to catch the merchant’s attention you will need to present yourself in a way that lets him know you are not a rube. It is a very good sign if he offers you tea. Sip it slowly and talk for a while of matters totally unrelated to the reason you are there. If there happens to be a piece of opium paraphernalia on display, an old lamp or pipe, ignore the item until sufficient pleasantries have been exchanged. After complimenting a few unrelated items, let your eyes rest on the piece of paraphernalia and inquire about it. Never be in a rush to ask its price, no matter how much you want it. Instead, get a sense of how much he knows about it and if he has more stashed out of sight. Often it takes more than one trip to get such information, so imagine the investment of time and money involved in going to China and following this routine at each and every antiques shop.
Shopping online still seemed to me a way to more quickly and efficiently get at what I was looking for. I had developed an eye for spotting fakes, pastiches, and extensive repair work so I wasn’t put off by the idea of buying without examining items in person. All I needed was a dealer in China whom I could trust not to bolt with my information and use it to mass-produce fakes.
I decided to try my luck with the guy in Beijing who had listed the “scholar tool” on eBay. Immediately after my initial email to him I got a reply. As eBay is loath for its users to do, we began a relationship outside of the site’s confines. The seller went by the name Alex and had only recently begun selling online. Alex was my age and had been trading in Chinese antiques on a small scale for a couple of years. He had no shop but instead had set himself up as a middleman—buying antiques at flea markets and then reselling to the owners of Beijing’s high-end antiques shops.
At first I was reluctant to let Alex know the real use for his “scholar tool,” but it soon became apparent that if I was unwilling to trust him with my knowledge there would be a real limit on what he could do for me. I proposed a trade—an education for the opportunity to have the first look at anything he found. I would also supply the contact information for a handful of other collectors who I knew would be interested in buying the items I had passed on. I was fortunate that Alex saw the opportunity for what it was—a way for him to corner the market before anyone else in China knew that a market even existed, giving him an advantage over all the other hunters and dealers who were out there looking for the next big collectible.
Over two years I fed Alex a steady stream of photos and requests. Once he had scoured Beijing’s flea markets and sidewalk stalls, he began making trips to explore other cities. The result was a bountiful harvest that wildly exceeded my expectations. Alex took a keen interest in the workings of the paraphernalia and its ornamentation, and seemed genuinely excited whenever he discovered a particularly well-crafted item. Unlike other Chinese merchants I had dealt with, he never feigned excitement in order to justify slapping exorbitant prices on his finds. No matter what Alex discovered, his prices always remained fair. With his help, I was able to acquire those pieces of paraphernalia that I’d previously seen only in historical photographs, and the complete working layout that Willi and I had dreamed of assembling became a reality.
Willi and I liked to think of ourselves as heirs to the lifestyle of wealthy, old-time smokers whose only limitations were their own imaginations. Not content with a single opium pipe, we amassed a small selection of pipes to choose from, each a favorite because of some unique detail in its design or ornamentation. Some were the aforementioned spoils of missionaries, long unused but finally put to the test by the two of us.
One pipe had once belonged to a Lao prince, its stem of knotty wood and mouthpiece of polished horn so heavily impregnated with opium resins that you might think they were carved from stone. Another cherished pipe was a standard model of which there had once been millions. Its mottled bamboo stem came from the forests of China’s Hunan Province. The stem was fitted with ivory end pieces—de rigueur on all but the most modest pipes—and on the paktong saddle was the pipe’s only adornment: a fiery red stone whose color was the yang meant to balance out the yin of the opium being smoked.
One of our pipes was of recent manufacture. Madame Tui’s husband, Vientiane’s maker of opium pipes, had apprenticed his only son to the craft at the age of thirteen. The old pipe maker had died in the late 1990s, but by that time he had also passed on his Vietnamese love for chased-silver depictions of muscular dragons to his son, Kai. By chance I met Kai, by then in his thirties, during a visit to Vientiane after the city’s opium dens had been shut down in 2002. Since their closure he had carried on as a silversmith, busying himself making jewelry and a few reproduction opium pipes for tourists.
A rare opportunity became clear to me as Kai told me his father’s story. The old pipe maker had learned his craft from an elderly Chinese who’d fled to Hanoi, in what was then French Indochina, just before the 1949 Communist victory in China. Less than a decade later, both men found themselves living under another opium-hostile Communist state—this time Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Madame Tui and her husband fled to Laos, then still a Buddhist kingdom, and set up shop in Vientiane. It was the right choice, given the country’s tolerance of the vice outlasted everyplace else on earth—the old pipe maker was able to carry on with his trade until shortly before his death.
By the end of Kai’s story I realized who I had standing in front of me: a classically trained opium pipe maker whose techniques were based on knowledge stretching all the way back to pre-Communist China. He was perhaps the very last of his kind, and there he was making trinkets for tourists! I asked him if I could commission the finest opium pipe he was capable of making. Kai was more than open to the idea of crafting a custom-made opium pipe—it clearly excited him. He had been using substandard materials—substituting brass for silver—to make cheap pipes for tourists because the relatively pricy examples that he had produced based on his fa
ther’s teachings sat unsold on the shelves of Vientiane’s souvenir shops. I asked Kai how much he would charge for his best work, and he estimated a price of no more than $200.
My self-designed pipe took nearly a year to finish. After finding a suitable piece of bamboo in the jungle, Kai had to cure the stem to ensure it would not split—a process that in itself took many months—before fashioning the silver fittings to my specifications. Ivory end pieces were essential but, of course, using new elephant tusks was out of the question. Instead, I picked through the antiques shops of Bangkok, Penang, and Singapore until I happened upon the perfect mouthpiece: It was a five-inch length of ivory that had begun its life as a sword handle. At some time in the distant past it had been detached from its blade and a hole had been carefully drilled through its center so the ivory handle could be used as an opium pipe’s mouthpiece. The idea was rather ghoulish—had the sword ever been used to kill anyone?—but my fondness for the rich, amber-colored patina of the ivory outweighed any qualms I had about inhaling opium vapors through it.
I took the ivory to Vientiane and left it with Kai along with hand-drawn schematics of what I felt would be the perfectly balanced pipe. When finally finished, the pipe would have a blond bamboo stem with silver fittings featuring painstakingly hammered motifs that included stalks of bamboo and lush leaves. It took several trips and many modifications before the pipe was right—Kai had never undertaken the crafting of a pipe of such expense and seemed anxious he might make an error that would ruin it. When he reached a step about which he had questions, there was no choice but to put the project away until I had the time to go to Vientiane and have a look. This was, of course, not a problem—every three months I had to leave Thailand and get a fresh tourist visa.
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