I began looking for an institution that would take my collection as a donation in return for an agreement to keep it intact—and with my name on it—in perpetuity. Things did not look promising. According to Roxanna, most museums would never agree to such a binding contract. She said that unless I was lucky enough to find a museum or institution that just happened to have a director or curator who was very interested in opium antiques, it was unlikely I could even give my collection away. I was beginning to feel like some bearded old kook who, having amassed the world’s largest ball of twine, demands that everyone take notice of his accomplishment.
Then I found a book edited by Dr. Priscilla Wegars of the University of Idaho’s Asian American Comparative Collection called Hidden Heritage: Historical Archaeology of the Overseas Chinese. The book was a major discovery for me for two reasons. First, there was one whole chapter about opium paraphernalia that had been unearthed at old Chinese settlements in the United States. Many of these opium relics were found in what would have been trash heaps—alongside old bottles and such—and most were broken and had been discarded. Pieces of pipe bowls were a common find. What I thought most remarkable was not what the archaeologists had found, but what they had been able to glean from mere shards. By having minutely examined the broken pieces, the authors of the chapter were able to describe how the pipe bowls had been made—how some were thrown on a potter’s wheel and others were molded by hand. I was so impressed by their findings that I contacted the editor. It turned out that Dr. Wegars was a former Peace Corps volunteer who had been posted in Thailand in the 1960s. She was due to visit for a Peace Corps reunion and would be stopping in Bangkok. We set up a date to meet and, after I showed her my collection, I offered it to the University of Idaho. Her enthusiasm gave me real hope that my collection had found a permanent home. When I flew to Amsterdam from Bangkok in April 2007, my spirits were soaring as high as the plane. I had secured a permanent home for my collection, the University of Idaho having agreed in a written contract that the “Steven Martin Collection” would be incorporated into the university’s Asian American Comparative Collection “for purposes of public display and enjoyment, education, conservation, and scholarship.” On top of that, my book had finally been published just weeks before, and I was even able to bring along with me a few advance copies of The Art of Opium Antiques.
Armand Hoorde was at the airport to greet me, and because we had been communicating via email and telephone on such a regular basis, it felt like a reunion with an old friend. It was mid-morning when I arrived, and he explained that the evening of the following day would be the opening night of his exhibition. The displays were not yet finished, and he expected to spend the whole day getting everything in order. Hoorde gave me the choice of going to his flat, where he said his wife would prepare breakfast for me and where I could get some rest, or going directly to the museum in Rotterdam to help with the displays. I didn’t have to pause to think! We drove straight from the airport to the museum, less than an hour away.
The museum, known as the Kunsthal Rotterdam, was housed in a stark, modernist building that I might have mistaken for a car dealership sans the cars. The space reserved for the opium paraphernalia exhibit was in a room divided so as to keep visitors walking along passageways. One wall was covered with opium-related ephemera such as movie posters and illustrations from old magazines. A small area nearby was arranged with a screen and chairs like a tiny movie theater in which a film short, narrated in French and featuring Hoorde’s daughter smoking opium, played over and over in a loop. Beyond this was a room within a room that could not be entered but could be viewed from an observation platform and through a window. This room on display was decorated with Chinese furniture and was supposed to portray an elaborate private smoking room complete with an opium bed.
Most of the exhibition was made up of antique paraphernalia in banks of display cases along the walls. These had not yet been sealed—the glass was not yet installed and the museum staff were hurrying to finish the displays. I noticed right away that the arrangement of the displays was based on the photos in Hoorde’s exhibition catalog—whose layouts with sundry accoutrements had been arranged by Hoorde himself before the photographer captured the images. Apparently somebody had simply used the photos from the book as a guide for the displays. The problem was twofold: First, some of the paraphernalia on the layout trays were out-and-out fakes. But even worse in my eyes was the fact that Hoorde had managed to mix Chinese and Vietnamese components on the same layout trays. This may sound nitpicky to the layman, but imagine seeing a museum display of classical antiquities in which the curators carelessly mixed Greek and Roman relics. Vietnamese opium-smoking paraphernalia in most cases surpassed the Chinese model in its meticulous ornamentation. In my opinion, an exhibition such as Hoorde’s should have been celebrating the Vietnamese contribution to the art form, yet nothing about the displays or on the labels differentiated the two.
Of course, there was no question of whether I would let the displays remain flawed. I pulled Hoorde aside and gently suggested that I rearrange the trays and remove the fakes. He didn’t get upset or angry, but instead told the museum staff not to seal any of the display cases until I had had a chance to inspect and approve everything.
I quickly set about making the necessary changes. I wanted everything to be perfect—yet my motives were not without some selfishness. This museum exhibition had a sensuality that could not be properly explored or appreciated if its items were behind glass. So many of the pipes and tools on display had been crafted with textures that were meant to excite an opium-enthralled sense of touch. With the display cases open I was able to get my hands on some of the most sumptuous pieces of opium paraphernalia remaining in existence. The exhibition’s showstopper was a porcelain pipe, shorter than most at just over eighteen inches long. It was the only pipe on display in the whole exhibition that was without a pipe bowl—because it had been acquired without one and because no pipe bowl could be found that matched the pipe stem’s magnificence. The porcelain stem was adorned with nine writhing five-toed dragons in low relief, whose bodies were sharply rendered with shimmering scales and surrounded by stylized flames. Glaze had been applied lightly so as not to clot the details. For a Chinese piece, the colors were subtle and harmonious, with a turquoise background and the dragons highlighted in pastel hues of yellow, lavender, and blue. The end piece and mouthpiece were thick cylinders of ivory with a mellow patina, and the silver rings that held them to the stem were hammered with two versions of the symbol for longevity.
Hoorde claimed the pipe once belonged to a member of the imperial household, but whether it was a genuine imperial piece or not, my hands trembled slightly as I lifted the pipe from its display case, feeling the scaly bodies of the dragons against the palms of my hands. I held the ivory mouthpiece to my lips and drew gently—had an emperor of the Middle Kingdom once done the same? Perhaps the pipe had belonged to Cixi, the empress dowager, who issued edicts against opium smoking and affixed her seal to them with one hand while rolling pills with the other. It was possible that this smooth, ivory bung had once caressed her thin, mean lips. While lightly inhaling on the pipe, the taste of caramelized opium resins that had long ago coated its bisque interior curled over my tongue like wisps of smoke. I then held the saddle’s socket close to my nose and drew in deeply its heady bouquet. The experience of handling all those rare pieces of paraphernalia would have been nothing short of orgasmic had I been able to smoke a few pipes beforehand, but even in my stone-sober state it was excruciatingly good.
Later that night, after Hoorde and I had finished preparing the exhibits, we returned to Amsterdam. He lived in a flat on a leafy street lined with rows of brick apartment buildings dating from the 1920s. Hoorde said that the neighborhood had once been wealthy and stylish, home to much of Amsterdam’s Jewish community before the Nazis marched in and seized the properties for themselves. His flat was reached via such a steep, narrow stairway that I expecte
d the interior to be similarly cramped. Instead it was roomy and had an engaging view of the street below, which bustled with bicycles and the occasional tram. Hoorde’s wife and daughter were there to greet me, and there was food ready at the table, but Hoorde suggested that we smoke a few pipes before eating in order to prime our appetites.
The living room of Hoorde’s apartment was a wide rectangle, at the back of which was a low platform about knee level in height—a perfect “bed” for smoking opium. The smoking area was spread with Japanese tatami mats and beyond it was a picture window looking out into the back garden and toward the back side of an identical apartment building. I joined Hoorde reclining on the mat but couldn’t keep myself from repeatedly peering out the picture window behind us. From where I lay I could see into the lighted windows of neighbors’ homes, and they no doubt could see us if they bothered to look. It felt wrong to be smoking opium in such a wide-open place.
Hoorde laughed at my paranoia. “This is Amsterdam,” he said. “Nobody cares what you do in your own home here, so long as you’re not hurting anybody.”
After speaking to him in Dutch, Hoorde’s wife and daughter excused themselves and went upstairs to bed. Hoorde explained that they had already eaten and had only been waiting for us to arrive from the museum. I was happy—at that moment I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than a few pipes of opium.
Because all of Hoorde’s collection was at the exhibition, his layout consisted of only the bare necessities: a pipe, a small brass tray, and a rather plain opium lamp known to collectors as a “coolie lamp.” This latter piece was a Vietnamese model and more decorative than its Chinese counterparts, but such lamps with their heavy base and thick glass chimneys were once a staple in working-class opium dens all over the Orient. If Hoorde’s lamp was a utilitarian Volkswagen Beetle, his opium pipe was a classic Cadillac, longer and wider than any pipe I’d ever used. Its bamboo stem was luxuriously sheathed in sleek tortoiseshell, dappled like the spots on a jaguar, and trimmed in ivory.
Unfortunately, Hoorde’s opium was inferior in quality to what I was used to. He said it was from Iran and it looked exactly like tar—its having been mixed with too much opium ash gave it a shiny black color. It dawned on me that this was probably why Hoorde had titled his exhibition The Black Perfume. An odd choice of words, given that his opium had that characteristic odor of dross, which Peter Lee accurately described in his book as smelling like cat piss.
Hoorde rolled himself a pipe and then prepared several for me. The high morphine content of the dross-adulterated opium immediately made itself apparent. I felt a numbing buzz creep up the back of my neck and over my scalp while at the same time a ticklish itch danced across my face. Opium always made me itch—an intense, prickly sensation that affected not only my face, but also a spot between my shoulder blades, and, most embarrassingly, my crotch. The end of one’s nose is especially susceptible to this itching, and the urge to scratch it produced what used to be known as “the opium smoker’s gesture”—a constant pulling at the nose and nostrils with the tips of the fingers. To the uninformed this looked like some compulsive tic, but people blissing on opium could spot one another in a crowd by noticing this distinctive gesticulation.
Yet even in opium’s peculiar side effects I found pleasure: I closed my eyes and lightly raked my fingernails over my face. Yes, the itch was incessant—but to scratch it was divine. There is a painting by French artist Henri Viollet executed a century ago called Le vice d’Asie: fumerie d’opium. The scene is an opium den, probably in Indochina, but perhaps in France. The proprietress, a dark-robed Chinese, is the painting’s centerpiece. Below her are four French visitors to the den, a woman and three men dressed in summertime whites. Aside from the rather dramatic pose of the proprietress, this painting strikes me as a rare illustration that was created from a real-life experience. After taking in the proprietress, the eye of the viewer tends to rest on the French woman to the right, her chin resting in an upturned palm and her glazed eyes gazing dreamily at something beyond our view. But it is the Frenchman at the far left who adds real authenticity to this scene. He sits alone, facing away from the others, staring down at his own lap and, lost in the deliciousness of the itch, uses both hands to scratch his face and scalp. To a nonsmoker this pose is all but incomprehensible, but to those who know opium intimately, the mere sight of this smoker brings a tingle of delight to the tip of the nose.
Le vice d’Asie: fumerie d’opium, a 1909 painting by Henri Viollet, is rare in that the imagery was taken from real life. Note the man at left scratching his face—itching is a common side effect of opium smoking. (Courtesy of Barbara Hodgson, Opium: A Portrait of the Heavenly Demon, Greystone Books, 1999)
After Hoorde and I both had six or seven pipes we ate dinner, and then I exhaustedly climbed into the bed in Pearl’s childhood bedroom, a tiny cubbyhole of a space upstairs above the living room. The next day, friends of his arrived from all over Europe to be in town for the exhibition’s opening, and visitors to his apartment came and went throughout the day. Most interesting of those I met was Maurice, a half French, half Lao whose ability to speak fluent Thai made me feel very much at home. Once things quieted down, Hoorde brought out his layout and invited Maurice to prepare some pipes, explaining that he had spent many hours in the opium dens of Vientiane and was an accomplished roller. That Maurice was an extraordinary “chef” made itself apparent within minutes. He began by cooking the opium using a technique that I had only read about in old accounts, something that Emily Hahn also described seeing in Shanghai in the 1930s:
Heh-ven never stopped conversing, but his hands were busy and his eyes were fixed on what he was doing—knitting, I thought at first, wondering why nobody had ever mentioned that this craft was practiced by Chinese men. Then I saw that what I had taken for yarn between the two needles he manipulated was actually a kind of gummy stuff, dark and thick. As he rotated the needle ends about each other, the stuff behaved like taffy in the act of setting; it changed color, too, slowly evolving from its earlier dark brown to tan.
This method of preparing opium is also memorialized in an early twentieth-century American invitation to indulge: “Let’s twist up a few,” the flappers used to say. When I asked Maurice if the technique was difficult to master, he immediately handed me the needles. “Try it,” he said in Thai, and then when I balked, he gave me one more demonstration. This “knitting” turned out to be one of those uncommon exercises that looks much more difficult to do than it really is. By my third try I had found my rhythm and was feeling confident enough to prepare a pipe for one of the other guests when Maurice excused himself to look for some tea.
The gentleman I was rolling for was a Colombian multimillionaire who lived in Switzerland. He was a collector not just of antique opium paraphernalia but that of other drugs as well. Like a kid showing off a favorite toy, he insisted that I examine a Victorian-era morphine syringe cradled in a velvet-lined leather etui that he just happened to have with him. Although merely looking at the wicked harpoon of a needle made me woozy, I could appreciate and relate to the fervor for his hobby that drove him to carry such a relic around on his person.
That evening, opening night for Opium: Het zwarte parfum at the Kunsthal Rotterdam, was only the third time in history that opium-smoking paraphernalia had been gathered and put on display as an art form. The first exhibition was in 1979 at the Stanford University Museum of Art. More recently Taiwan’s National Museum of History had attempted an exhibition, titled Centuries of Smoke Stains: The Art of Opium Utensils. Sadly, this 2004 exhibition was liberally peppered with fakes, and although I didn’t go see the show, viewing the photographs in the exhibition catalog I could tell that nearly half of the pipes illustrated were modern reproductions.
Of course, there had been many informal exhibitions of opium pipes and paraphernalia through the years. Historically, whenever authorities were about to destroy a number of opium pipes, the condemned items were put on public display days
before the bonfire was lit. I have collected photographs of such pipe burns in China and America, and Roxanna remembered seeing one of these displays in wartime Saigon. In 1909, during the days leading up to the Shanghai Opium Conference, hundreds of opium pipes were laid out on display and then stacked like cordwood and burned for attending journalists to witness. Opium-pipe bonfires were held every few years in San Francisco until the 1920s. The most remarkable of these events happened in that city in 1914 when Mayor James Rolph, who was presiding over a pre-burn ceremony, noticed the artistry of some of the pipes about to be incinerated. Under the headline “A Twenty-Thousand-Dollar Pipeful,” a local newspaper reported that the paraphernalia to be destroyed included “several hundred pipes, centuries old, beautifully carved, and ornamented with gold and jewels.” In a rare move that could only have happened in San Francisco, the mayor decided then and there to save the most magnificent examples and decreed that they be donated to the city’s Golden Gate Museum. Where are those opium pipes today? I wish I knew.
The Kunsthal Rotterdam effort was a fine one. The opening night drew collectors, dealers, and aficionados from as far away as San Francisco and, of course, Bangkok. Among the crowd of attendees I was finally able to put faces on names, and in some cases, to put names on eBay handles.
As prone to cloak-and-daggery as collectors can be behind one another’s backs, they can be quite charming in person. I was surprised and delighted by how many people at the exhibition seemed to know of me. I found myself being approached by visitors with questions about the displays and asked to pose for group photos with other collectors. Many knew that my book was out, and some asked how they might obtain a copy. Everyone I talked to was in perfect awe of the exhibition and happy they had made the trip to see the once-in-a-lifetime event. Only one person seemed not to enjoy himself—a French collector who was seen glaring at the treasures in disbelief and muttering curses under his breath.
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