In a long absence brought on by illness, I saw the truth of opium. Opium is a reflecting pool, spurned by those who dream of blackened, abyssal oblivion. A reflecting pool is but a shallow pond, yet to the pious soul its horizons border on nothing short of eternity.
Opium demands the highest degree of piety.
“Mr. Wakabayashi also took us to see an opium den. It was located along a narrow alley crowded with brothels and eateries. The brothel next door was a small house with one door and a single room. The sight of a prostitute (between fourteen and twenty years of age) standing in the door, beckoning to potential customers was too painful to watch. Above the door into the opium den hung a sign reading, “Restricted Opium Use Here.” By moderating and eventually bringing an end to opium smoking, the authorities actually allowed opium use, which they then taxed as a source of revenue for the Fengtian government. In recent years, Zhang Zuolin [1875–1928] had been compelling farmers in the Northeast to cultivate opium for the same reason that he could extract a heavy tax on it. This opium den was a run-down house, not the sort of place frequented by persons of wealth. In the center of the room was an earthen floor, and several customers were lying prostrate on their sides on bed matting to the left and right as they smoked opium. People were wearing whatever they happened to have on. Already completely intoxicated, they were adrift in the land of dreams, sleeping with their faces turned upward. With the flames from a hand-held lantern, an assistant enabled those customers half-awake and half in a daze to smoke from a large pipe bowl full of opium the color of refined dark sugar. Not a single customer there seemed to notice us looking at them. Perhaps they were lost at the peak of their pleasurable dreams, but to those of us looking on it was a wretched, horrific sight.”
(Akiko Yosano, Travels in Manchuria and Mongolia: A Feminist Poet from Japan Encounters Prewar China)
Notes: Akiko, as a Japanese woman of means, encounters the opium den as a representative of a radical exteriority. Interestingly, her horror at the sight of the “prostrating” smokers, identifying them as worshipers of the lamp, expresses a sense of disgust with inhibition. The cultivated, post-Victorian individual sees only abjection in a complete loss of composure. Perhaps this further marks a distinguishing characteristic of opium smoking, namely that opium is about collecting a patch of ground for one’s ownmost self–even if only for an hour.
On can scarcely be captious of where one smokes when abroad. The question of the private den is another matter altogether. Inevitably, the composition of a private den is read as an objectification of the smoker’s interiority, the outgrowth of some like-wise cool and torrid inward-life.
The very first ‘eve upon which I became acquainted with the ways of opium I smoked astride a cold, hard wooden floor. Some say insufficient comfort deprives the airways of the freedom necessary for proper circulation.
Thereafter, I accustomed the meager trappings of my private quarters to the comportment required to facilitate a proper den. Given my limitations, this meant the employment of my low mattress as a smoking platform, and the acquisition of a table of suitable height. Ever since, I have never had a nights sleep that did not mirror the days it lays between. For, so accustomed to reclining on one’s side, knees together, and the arch of the top foot resting on the ball of the lower, I can scarcely sleep unless I assume my customary smoking position.
As my condition changed, I came into the use of a dedicated space; no longer should the parliament of my belongings smell of that oily smoke. Barely more than a windowed closet, I constructed a modest space of considerable ambition. A woven rice mat was placed upon the floor, and a folded blanket upon it on one side. Tapestries were hung from the walls, between which hung the pipes available for usage. Lit only by red lanterns and an opium lamp, I would betray the heartfelt confidence of any party to defend my tender sanctuary, so inundated with the scent of opium and incense.
It was in this netherworld of my ownmost phantasie that I found fountain of youth, the fruits of Elysium. It was in such caves of ice that one gleans a subtle truth:
Opium is a monarch; and a monarch’s hidden splendor only unfolds in the bounds of a kingdom.
The smooth crackle of the opium pipe; the music of old Hong Kong
Any smoker, any denizen of this sickly lamplight, knows that opium has dreadful little to do with alkaloids and their physiological effects. I have never known even the most pious tender of the pipe to say “Oh! Were it that I had just smoked opium!” The grace of opium dances in that subliminal space, somewhere between the lighting of the lamp and the final breath. The addict wishes only that they could always be in the process of smoking.
Aged Pu’erh is to opium what the Earth is to the Sky
The following excerpts are from The Opium War by Julia Lovell. A quite excellent book which tackles the unique historiographic and representational difficulties posed by a history of opium. If China and the West are to agree on one thing, it’s that the opium trade was a wretched practice, a sentiment which they respectively project onto the past. Things are not so simple, of course, and the language of late-20th century drug politics falls short of even approaching this subject with any degree of credulity. As Lovell shows us, the past is like a free man, forced from his home, and cast into slavery by the present and future. Though present and future taskmasters may subject the past to labour after their own objectives, the possibility of revolt increases with each new day. Lovell’s The Opium War is one such vision of emancipation.
“Opium has been an extraordinary shape-shifter in both the countries that would fight a war in its name in the early 1840s. In Britain and China, it began as a foreign drug (Turkish and Indian, respectively) that was first naturalized during the nineteenth century, then – at the end of that same century – sternly repatriated as an alien poison. For most of the century, neither popular nor expert medical opinion could agree on anything concerning opium, beyond the fact that it relieved pain. Was it more or less harmful than alcohol? Did it bestialize its users? Did it make your lungs go black and crawl with opium-addicted maggots? No one could say for sure. ‘The disaster spread everywhere as the poison flowed into the hinterlands . . . Those fallen into this obsession will ever utterly waste themselves’, mourned one late-Qing smoker, Zhang Changjia, before observing a few pages on, ‘Truly, opium is something that the world cannot do without.’ The clichéd image of opium-smoking is of prostration and narcolepsy; to many (including Thomas de Quincey, who walked the London streets by night sustained by laudanum), it was a stimulant. China’s coolie masses would refresh their capacity for backbreaking labour with midday opium breaks. One reverend in the late-nineteenth century observed that such groups ‘literally live on the opium; it is their meat and drink’. Things were little different in the Victorian Fens: ‘A man who is setting about a hard job takes his [opium] pill as a preliminary,’ wrote one mid-century observer, ‘and many never take their beer without dropping a piece of opium into it’. To add to the confusion about opium’s effects, British commanders in China between 1840 and 1842 noticed that Qing soldiers often prepared themselves for battle by stoking themselves up on the drug: some it calmed; others it excited for the fight ahead; others again, it sent to sleep.
Even now, after far more than a century of modern medicine, much remains unknown about opium’s influence on the human constitution. Whether eaten, drunk or smoked, the drug’s basic effects are the same: its magic ingredient is morphine…
[…]
Opium began life in the Chinese empire as an import from the vaguely identified ‘Western regions’ (ancient Greece and Rome, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Persia and Afghanistan); the earliest Chinese reference (in a medical manual) occurs in the first half of the eighth century. Eaten or drunk, prepared in many different ways (ground, boiled, honeyed, infused, mixed with ginger, ginseng, liquorice, vinegar, black plums, ground rice, caterpillar fungus), it served for all kinds of ailments (diarrhoea and dysentery, arthritis, diabetes, malaria, chronic coughs, a weak constitution). By the eleventh century, it was recognized for its recreational, as well as curative uses. ‘It does good to the mouth and to the throat’, observed one satisfied user. ‘I have but to drink a cup of poppy-seed decoction, and I laugh, I am happy.’ ‘It looks like myrrha’, elaborated a court chronicle some four hundred years later. ‘It is dark yellow, soft and sticky like ox glue. It tastes bitter, produces excessive heat and is poisonous . . . It enhances the art of alchemists, sex and court ladies . . . Its price equals that of gold.’9 Opium was supposed to help control ejaculation which, as sexological theory told it, enabled the sperm to retreat to feed the male brain. Opium-enriched aphrodisiacs became a boom industry in Ming China (1368–1644) – possibly contributing to the high death-rate of the dynasty’s emperors (eleven out of a total of sixteen Ming rulers failed to get past their fortieth birthday). In 1958, as part of a final push to root out the narcotic in China, the new Communist government excavated the tomb of Wanli, the hypochondriac (though long-lived) emperor of the late Ming, and found his bones saturated with morphine. Enterprising Ming cooks even tried to stir-fry it, fashioning poppy seeds into curd as a substitute for tofu. Opium was one of the chief ingredients of a Ming-dynasty cure-all, the ‘big golden panacea’ (for use against toothache, athlete’s foot and too much sex), in which the drug was combined with (amongst other things) bezoar, pearl, borneol, musk, rhinoceros horn, antelope horn, catechu, cinnabar, amber, eaglewood, aucklandia root, white sandalwood; all of which had first to be gold-plated, then pulverized, turned into pellets with breast-milk, and finally swallowed with pear juice. (Take one at a time, the pharmacological manuals recommended.)
It was yet another import – in the shape of tobacco from the New World – that led to the smoking of opium. Introduced to China at some point between 1573 and 1627 (around the same time as the peanut, the sweet potato and maize), by the middle of the seventeenth century tobacco-smoking had become an empire-wide habit. As the Qing established itself in China after 1644, the dynasty made nervous attempts to ban it as ‘a crime more heinous even than that of neglecting archery’: smokers and sellers could be fined, whipped and even decapitated. But by around 1726, the regime had given up the empire’s tobacco addiction as a bad job, with great fields of the stuff swaying just beyond the capital’s walls. And somewhere in the early eighteenth century, a new, wonderful discovery had reached China from Java, carried on Chinese ships between the two places: that tobacco was even better if you soaked it first in opium syrup (carried mainly in Portuguese cargoes). First stop for this discovery was the Qing’s new conquest, Taiwan; from there it passed to the mainland’s maritime rim, and then the interior.
It was smoking that made Chinese consumers take properly to opium. Smoking was sociable, skilled and steeped in connoisseurship (with its carved, bejewelled pipes of jade, ivory and tortoiseshell, its silver lamps for heating and tempering the drug, its beautiful red sandalwood couches on which consumers reclined). It was also less likely to kill the consumer than the eaten or drunk version of the drug: around 80–90 per cent of the morphia may have been lost in fumes from the pipe or exhaled. Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, China made opium-smoking its own: a chic post-prandial; an essential lubricant of the sing-song (prostitution) trade; a must-have hospitality item for all self-respecting hosts; a favourite distraction from the pressures of court life for the emperor and his household. Opium houses could be salubrious, even luxurious institutions, far from the Dickensian den-of-vice stereotype (like an ‘intimate beer-house’, a surprised Somerset Maugham pronounced in 1922 – a mature stage in China’s drug plague), in which companionable groups of friends might enjoy a civilized pipe or two over tea and dim-sum.
Somewhere near the start of the nineteenth century, smokers began to dispense with the diluting presence of tobacco – perhaps because pure opium was more expensive, and therefore more status-laden. Around this time, thanks to the quality control exercised by the diligent rulers of British India (who established a monopoly over opium production in Bengal in 1793), the supply also became more reliable, no longer regularly contaminated by adulterants such as horse dung and sand. A way of burning money, smoking was the perfect act of conspicuous consumption. Every stage was enveloped in lengthy, elaborate, costly ritual: the acquisition of exquisite paraphernalia; the intricacy of learning how to cook and smoke it (softening the dark ball of opium to a dark, caramelized rubber, inserting it into the hole on the roof of the pipe bowl, then drawing slowly, steadily on the pipe to suck the gaseous morphia out); the leisurely doze that followed the narcotic hit. The best families would go one step further in flaunting their affluence, by keeping an opium chef to prepare their pipes for them. The empire’s love affair with opium can be told through the beautiful objects it manufactured for consuming the drug, through the lyrics that aficionados composed to their heavy, treacly object of desire, or in bald statistics.
Foreign traders of the early nineteenth century had only a partial role to play: distribution deep into the mainland was carried out by native – Chinese, Manchu, Muslim – smugglers. The clippers sailed up to Lintin, a small, nondescript island about a third of the way between Hong Kong and Canton. There, they discharged their cargo onto superannuated versions of themselves: retired hulks serving as floating depots. Long, slim Chinese smuggling boats – known in the trade as ‘centipedes’, ‘fast crabs’ or ‘scrambling dragons’, and rowed by twenty to seventy thoroughly armed men apiece – would then draw up, into which opium was loaded, to fulfil orders purchased at the factories in Canton. From here, the drug entered the empire’s circulatory system: along the south coast’s threadwork of narrow waterways, and into Canton itself – amid consignments of less contentious goods, under clothes, inside coffins. At every stage, there was employment for locals: for the brokers, couriers and ‘shroffs’ (who checked for counterfeit silver) on board European vessels and in European pay; for the tough Tankas who made the dragons scramble; for the smugglers who brought it ashore; for the Cantonese middlemen; for the proprietors of opium shops, restaurants, tea-houses and brothels.
And every stage in the trade required officialdom to look the other way – which for the most part they obligingly did, even as the traces of the business surrounded them. One of Matheson’s Calcutta associates put it nicely, wondering sarcastically that the agency’s opium clippers ‘have ever been able to trade at all. A European-rigged vessel gives the alarm against herself whenever she appears, and lodges an information in the hands of every individual . . . Only think of the Chinese going to smuggle tea on the coast of England in a junk!’ Generally, all that was required to land opium was cash outlay and sometimes a touch of doublespeak. If an opium consignee was lucky, the responsible mandarin would simply demand a businesslike bribe per box of opium – like a species of duty, as if the cargo were nothing more controversial than cotton, or molasses. If he were less fortunate, he would suffer a lecture administered first on the evils of the opium trade, or perhaps a personal reading of the emperor’s latest edict on the subject, then be allowed to hand over the bribe. But connivance – because of the profit to be made from it – seems to have been the basic rule: one exploratory trade mission by the EIC up the north China coast in 1832 was greeted by disappointment all the way, as the ship, the Lord Amherst, had neglected to bring opium.
Bouncing back from a brief hiatus in which I was too want for energy to post anything, I am pleased to present these stunning photographs of opium smoking in post-war China (Second World War). These photos were taken between 1945 and 1946 by George Lacks, who served in the Pacific theatre as a war correspondent on behalf of LIFE magazine. I recommend the collection to anyone interested in the culture of post-war China, the collection spanning from more documentary military photography to startling portraiture. His photos of Chinese brothels are especially captivating, however my true interest rests in his opium den photographs.
These photographs represent precious, beautifully composed depictions of the twilight of opium use in China proper, captured in the brief period between the end of the Second World War and the effective conclusion of opium smoking in China brought about by the Cultural Revolution. This was a period in which the opium trade flourished, despite a significant degree of downward moral outrage in the dying days of the Qing dynasty. The opium trade in post-war China, unbeknownst to all, would see its final days within the next 25 years, after nearly 400 years of cultural and economic envelopment.
Used to feed the coffers of the Chinese Nationalists as they struggled to quell the Communist rebellion, opium had little place in Mao’s China. Why is that, however? Opium had turned profits for the Chinese Nationalists, for the French in Southeast Asia, for the Japanese, for the British, why could it not be a source of profit for the Communists? Better yet, opium smoking represented something almost distinctly Chinese and is one of the few institutions which so brazenly bridged classes. Why did Mao’s cultural revolution push so heavily for the eradication of opium, long before the drug wars of today?
If the objective of the Cultural Revolution was to reinvent China’s social and cultural imaginary in line with Mao’s own interpretation of Marxist-Leninist thought, Mao had to reconfigure, reframe, and, ultimately, physically eradicate the memory of China’s cultural heritage. Here, Maoism, for all of its rhetorical fancy, demonstrates a profound cynicism towards the central elements of a Marxist conceptualization of history: dialectical materialism and historical materialism. Certainly, Lenin was no textbook Marxist, spurring on the revolution where the Marxist orthodoxy held that capitalism in Russia needed to succumb to its implicit contradictions for communism to be possible. This notion, that communism represented the eschatological conclusion of a historical process of which capitalism was an essential component, is a key facet of the historical materialist understanding of history: the argument that historical change is driven by struggle between the productive (economic) relations of society and that historical societies can be understood by analyzing these relations (Greek slave states, feudal serfdom, etc).
Dialectical materialism, the philosophical foundation of historical materialism, complicates this simple structure. Marx describes his idea of dialectical materialism as an inversion of Hegel’s objective idealism. It is Engels, Marx’s friend and coauthor, who first put forward the concept of dialectical materialism as it is generally understood in Marx’s Das Kapital: Historical societies pass through phases, like physical states of matter; the foundation of particular human thoughts and behaviour is derived from the physical relations of their world; contradiction is an implicit quality of all things; and the negation of the negation is a higher synthesis. One outcome of this is the belief that human subjectivity, lacking a fixed self-nature, is shaped by the material circumstances of their world, such that the citizens of a socialist nation will gradually come to think and act more and more communally.
The Cultural Revolution is much more in keeping with the totalitarian thinking of German writers like Ernst Jünger, whose essay Total Mobilization advocated for a society which was culturally, economically, and administratively driven toward a specific sense of ideological meaning. In other totalitarian states one recognizes the anxiety felt by the regime in the face of social organization outside of those spaces demarcated by the state. In the Soviet Union, for example, racism was against party policy, yet they systemically persecuted the Jewish population by targeting their ability to organize as a community as well as a religion. Their concern, however, was not that Jewish people were meeting, but rather that people were meeting as Jewish people. Totalitarianism demands that every facet of the social and cultural life of its people takes place within a defined ideological space. Organized religion, non-governmental youth organizations, and social clubs are all regarded with suspicion, if not immediately suppressed, because they undermine the ideological cohesion of the regime. Therein lies the requirement of eradicating opium smoking in Communist China.
The Cultural Revolution demanded the eradication of opium culture in China at least in part because it was a remnant of Imperial society, however the only substantive threat it posed to Communist China was its entrenched social function. Cobblers, rickshaw drivers, rope makers, and leather tanners alike would freely mingle, participating in a social space which existed outside of the ideological state’s monolithic self-concept. Opium culture, which involves physical space, capital, social involvement, emotional investment, traditions, lore, art, and distinct practices, represented a threat to the totality of Chinese Communism by creating societal strongholds against singular ideological domination. These photos wondrously capture the dying days of this rich historical culture.
It should comes as a surprise to none that the preferred accouterments of the Imperial elite are, today, some of the fetishized commodities to have ever come out of China, undoubtedly aided by the Revolution’s inadvertently turning a vice and social pass time into something mysteriously forgotten and tantalizingly Oriental.
Having just smoked the finest Chandu I’ve ever had the luxury of trying in my entire life–
If there be but a solitary beauty in this world, let it be opium, no vice, neither the bottle, the flesh, or even the needle, has ever been so perfect!
On ought to eat before smoking; opium, itself releasing such a ravenous thirst in me, frees up the appetite, but eating seems to dampen the effect.
The Opium Den on the End of your Street 