Opium Fiend: A 21st Century Slave to a 19th Century Addiction

One of the marvels of opium is its ability to exalt sensitivity, it transforms the most boorish people into courteous creatures by establishing true equality between races and sexes.

—Max Olivier-Lacamp, Le kief (1974)

“Don’t sell yourself short!” Roxanna said with insistence as I was vaporizing a pill. “And don’t overestimate how much he knows. He wouldn’t have flown all the way to Thailand if he knew enough to write his own book. If you give away your knowledge for free, Armand Hoorde will use it as his own and you’ll have nothing to show for it.”

“He said I’d be on a list of contributors on the title page.”

“That’s not enough. At least make him pay you for your work.… How many was that?” Roxanna interrupted herself as I handed the pipe back to her.

“I don’t know. I forgot to keep count again. Sorry.”

Awkwardly—because I was feeling too relaxed to bother sitting up—I reached toward the tray. Plucking three tamarind seeds from a small silver box adorned with a Chinese dragon, I dropped them into the box’s cylindrical lid. During my trips to smoke opium with Willi, he had never once asked for monetary contributions—our sessions were infrequent and my gifts of paraphernalia and decorative objects for the Chamber were enough. But my visits to smoke with Roxanna had become so regular that she asked if I would mind paying for the chandu I smoked. She somehow figured the cost per pipe based on how many drops she used for each pill. It was up to me to keep count using the tamarind seeds, which were brown and smooth, about the size of coffee beans. The tamarind seeds’ texture and stone-like hardness were appealing to my opium-sensitized fingertips. I chose them as counters for precisely that reason—no detail was too minute for opium’s most fastidious fancier.

Roxanna and I were discussing whether I should be paid for my contribution to Hoorde’s catalog. I had received a compact disc with the text and images that were to make up the publication, and I saw that it wasn’t going to be some low-budget affair. The chapter I had agreed to contribute was already written—my job was to rewrite it. The original text had been penned by another Dutchman who had contacted me a couple years before, asking questions about opium pipe bowls and saying vaguely that he was working on “a paper.” I didn’t give him any information because at the time I was working on my own book. When I finally saw the makings of Hoorde’s book, I was glad I had refused. Hoorde would not have needed my help had I been too free with my knowledge a couple years earlier.

I thought Roxanna was perhaps right about Hoorde’s lack of knowledge. The images taken for his book, while beautifully photographed, included a number of fakes and pieces that had nothing to do with opium smoking. Seeing these pictures reminded me of when Hoorde was visiting Bangkok and I had taken him to the antiques shops at River City mall. Once or twice he surprised me by gushing over some piece that was clearly not a tool of the trade. In one case he became very enthusiastic about a small cloisonné tray that was being offered as a lamp tray. The pattern of the enamel indicated that it was Japanese—and that alone is evidence enough that it was not crafted for smoking opium. The Japanese never produced opium paraphernalia for the simple reason that anti-opium laws in Japan were, from the earliest times, very severe and rigorously enforced. Still, I thought Hoorde might have just been testing me.

Roxanna was enjoying her cigarette break—she never smoked more than one or two per session. I took advantage of the pause in rolling to open the windows and turn on the electric fan. Then I went downstairs to get two glasses of ice and a bottle of Gatorade from the refrigerator. The sports drink wasn’t exactly traditional, but Roxanna and I found it the best way to stay hydrated in the heat of that upstairs room. When I returned, Roxanna stubbed out her cigarette but continued on the subject of insisting on remuneration for consultation. She said she had once been hesitant to charge collectors when they approached her for ceramics appraisals—shyness and a low opinion of herself caused her to undervalue her own growing expertise. “Rewriting that chapter for Hoorde may seem easy to you, but think of how many years and how much money it’s taken for you to get where you are today. All that collecting and studying. Your time and knowledge are just as valuable as any other professional’s. Charge him accordingly.”

At first I saw myself being compensated in other ways. Hoorde helped me acquire several pieces, including a porcelain stand for pipe bowls that he came across during a stopover in Hong Kong on his way back to Amsterdam. But as my smoking increased, so did my need for cash. By the time my trip to Europe was a month away, I was spending the equivalent of my monthly rent on smoking. So I renegotiated my arrangement with Hoorde, who agreed to pay me for my contribution to his book while generously keeping his promise to cover my journey to Europe.

A serious collector can’t help but notice that the life span of a typical collection often only barely exceeds the life span of its owner. Once, at an antiques shop in Bangkok that specialized in antiquarian maps and books with Southeast Asian themes, I talked to the German proprietor of many years. He told of having European and American clients who visited Thailand annually, buying old books and maps to take back home to their collections. Often the collector had a wife and kids in tow. “He comes every year with his family and I watch as he gets older and his children grow into adults. I get to know them all very well. Then one or two years pass and he doesn’t come to Bangkok and I wonder what happened to him. If he is already old I can guess what happened.”

The antiquarian book dealer explained that sometimes his suspicions were confirmed when a deceased collector’s family contacted him and wanted to sell the collection back. “I often get very good deals because the wife and especially the children have no interest in Father’s hobby. Sometimes they are even a little hostile toward the collection because so much of Father’s attention was given to his precious things. Families like this practically give back the books and maps to me for free.”

I had observed something similar happening with the online auctions—where it was very common to see collections being scattered to the wind. The ones that I noticed being sold off piece by piece to the highest bidder had nothing to do with opium, but by using a collector’s eye I saw things that others might not have taken note of. In one case I watched the dissolution of an extensive collection of vintage firecracker labels. I could see that they had been meticulously gathered, just as a serious collector of stamps would have done: Every little variation in design, no matter how small, was represented. When such attention to detail was obvious I could easily imagine the passion of the person who had spent years putting the collection together. To that collector, each and every piece would have a backstory about how and where it was acquired and, if the collector was inclined to do research, a detailed description of its history and provenance would also have been recorded. I watched this auction as the labels—stripped of all their history—brought in a few dollars here and a few dollars there, and the disparate lots went to buyers on different continents.

In 2004, a small but significant collection of opium antiques came up on eBay. The seller knew little about the items and would tell me only that the mother of a man who had died recently brought them in to be sold on consignment. The seller said that the mother didn’t want her son’s name disclosed, and so I could learn nothing about this collector except that he had lived in the Chicago area. I was able to buy some of his opium pipes, a few of which were very important pieces—including a pipe with a stem made from lacquered sugarcane that the seller didn’t correctly describe (in the auction the pipe was listed as bamboo). At first I didn’t recognize the pipe for what it was, either, but I bid on it and won the auction. It wasn’t until much later—after I had used a photo of the pipe to illustrate my book and erroneously captioned it “an odd species of bamboo”—did I realize that I owned one of the few surviving examples of a sugarcane opium pipe. This is something the original owner himself might have known, but if he did, he took that information to the grave.

The notion that a similar fate might befall my own collection was enough to cause me sleepless nights. After dedicating a decade of my life to the one collection that had really caught my imagination, after the hours of meticulous research (all of it quite enjoyable, I had to admit), not to mention the money I had invested, the thought that the compilation I had put so much effort into assembling might someday end up on eBay—or worse, being haggled over by greedy shopkeepers and clueless tourists in Bangkok’s antiques shops—was truly distressing.

I had long before decided that I would become the expert on opium paraphernalia. If I was going to be remembered for one thing, I wanted this to be it. Getting my book published was a start, but space constraints had meant that what was discussed and illustrated in my book was only a tiny fraction of what I knew and had collected. I needed a repository for both the goods and the information.

I toyed with the idea of opening a small museum in Bangkok’s Chinatown. If my worst nightmare was having my collection shattered and scattered, my favorite daydream was to found and be the curator of my own museum—not some hall of institutional boredom with uninspired displays and labels that nobody bothered to read, but one of those weird little private museums that announces itself with a series of hokey roadside signs. I dreamed of something quirky enough to be hip yet academic enough to be taken seriously, a place where I could spend my days having conversations with visitors from all over the world. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it could work. I even picked out a vacant century-old shophouse in a quiet lane near my apartment that I thought would be the perfect venue.

I discussed the project with an acquaintance—a Thai-Chinese businessman who was also a novice collector of opium antiques and who thought such a private museum might even turn a profit if it were done right. He had noticed the daily parade of tour buses hitting the Chinatown sights, such as the giant Golden Buddha at Wat Traimit monastery, and he felt a museum about opium would fit perfectly onto the tour companies’ itinerary. He declared himself interested and set out to see if it could be done, but it didn’t take long before he gave up on the idea. It seemed that the tour operators expected to be paid for each tourist they brought in; that each busload of visitors stopping by the museum would be accompanied by a tour guide with a smiling face and upturned palm. But before any of that could happen the tour companies would also have to be plied with substantial monetary enticement. When I heard all this, I was happy my collector acquaintance had lost interest. It was all too much like a business for my tastes.

Willi, too, thought my collection could be an opportunity to earn money. He suggested a friend of his in Hong Kong who might be able to get permission to start a museum there, but by that time I was wary of any moneymaking ventures. What if the museum went bankrupt? What if the authorities decided to just walk in and confiscate everything? Technically opium paraphernalia was still illegal in Hong Kong. Museums can get waivers because of their mission to educate, but who could trust a museum in China-controlled Hong Kong? China has been so intensely propagandizing its past, oversimplifying and emotionalizing its historic relationship with opium, that most Chinese—indeed most of the world—are convinced that the drug showed up on China’s shores with the British, who then forced millions to become addicted at gunpoint. What would Chinese authorities make of Chinese-made paraphernalia whose opulence suggested Chinese complicity? I didn’t think that China, or anyplace it controlled, would be right for a museum to house my collection.

Ideally I thought my collection would be best housed and displayed in America, perhaps in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where opium smoking in the Chinese manner first got a foothold in the New World. Such a museum would be historically relevant to the entire country. Not only were a large percentage of the pieces I had acquired for my collection sourced in the United States, but late-nineteenth-century America had the largest population of opium smokers outside of Asia. But as I’ve mentioned earlier, the association of opium smoking with Chinese people has become politically charged in America, and so a museum presenting antique opium paraphernalia as an art form would probably be about as welcome in one of America’s Chinatowns as it would be in China itself.

In San Francisco in 2004, I met Gaetano Maeda—an entrepreneur and filmmaker who was in town arranging the annual International Buddhist Film Festival. After graciously taking the time to listen to my ideas, he suggested that Las Vegas would be the only place in the United States that could host the type of museum I dreamed of opening. This was because the city’s cultural diversions were aimed at visitors who were quickly jaded by the sheer depth of choices for entertainment. Investors were therefore always looking for something new and unusual to grab tourists’ attention. If anyplace in America could host an opium museum and turn a profit, Maeda thought it would be Las Vegas. I thanked him for his advice, and then I promptly gave up on the museum idea. Nothing against Las Vegas, but my collection simply did not belong there.

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 expected 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.

But for Hoorde, the night was not without its complications. During the previous day he had told me that a third of the items on display belonged to an old friend of his, another Dutchman named Cees Hogendoorn, who was confined to some sort of institution. Hogendoorn had self-published an unusual book, whose cover claimed it was a “supplement” to Hoorde’s catalog and, much to Hoorde’s chagrin, Hogendoorn managed to get his book on the shelves of the Kunsthal Rotterdam bookshop. The book was oddly named Opium: The Art of Lost Collections, and between photos of the author’s opium antiques was the story of how he had come to be institutionalized. Hoorde told me about how his old friend had agreed to lend his collection for the exhibition but then later became convinced that Hoorde would keep the best pieces for himself. Was Hogendoorn really justified in thinking that his collection was “lost,” or was this an example of the collecting impulse taken to its furthest extreme—a descent into madness?

Confiscated opium paraphernalia, including hundreds of pipes, are publicly burned in San Francisco in 1914. Though this was common practice during official campaigns to combat opium use, this particular pipe burn is notable because San Francisco’s mayor saved the most opulent pipes from incineration and had them donated to the city’s Golden Gate Museum. (From the author’s collection)

After having dinner at a restaurant with Hoorde, his family, friends, and the museum staff to celebrate opening night, I accompanied Hoorde and his family back to their apartment where all of us—except Hoorde’s wife—had a smoke. Later Hoorde explained to me that his wife did not approve of his opium smoking, but that he and his daughter often smoked together. “I’m afraid Pearl likes it a little too much,” he said.

I had taken an immediate liking to Pearl. She was one of those young people—in her mid-twenties at the time—whose maturity allows them to mix naturally with adults twice their age. I sat next to her during the opening night dinner, and my conversations with her didn’t make me feel old—as encounters with young people sometimes can—but instead her infectious enthusiasm made me feel half my age. Pearl had tried to talk me into accompanying her to one of Holland’s famous “coffee shops” to sample the marijuana, hashish, and mushrooms. It would have been fun with Pearl as a guide, but I begged off. Experiencing the sights and sounds of Europe for the first time was exciting enough. There was no need for hallucinations when I wasn’t yet bored with reality. Besides, I was convinced that nothing was better than opium.

I was also beginning to acquire a taste for Hoorde’s drossy concoction. The high-morphine content gave me a buzz that I remembered from smoking at the opium dens in Laos. It was a feeling I thought I would never go back to after experiencing the sophisticated bliss produced by Willi’s fabulous chandu, but by day three in Holland I found myself craving that numbing buzz. Dross has a bad reputation that stretches way back. There are nineteenth-century paintings on rice paper done by forgotten Chinese artists that depict wretched dross smokers begging for handfuls of the potent opium ash to sustain their habits. In old China, smoking dross was the end of the line—a smoker’s declaration of abject poverty and failure.

In old American and Canadian accounts, dross was known as “yen shee,” a loanword from Cantonese. When opium was cheap and plentiful, yen shee was used in North America as it was in China—as a way of cutting pure opium to make it last longer and give it a kick. Later, when opium in America became scarce as a result of the enforcement of anti-opium laws, the much cheaper dross was smuggled in from China as an alternative. Opium ash by itself was difficult to smoke—rolling it into a pill shape was not always possible—but dross could also be mixed with coconut oil and made into pellets that were taken orally. If mixed with sherry or port wine, yen shee became “yen shee suey”—a colorful example of an American-coined pidgin Cantonese term. However, like the drinking of laudanum, the oral consumption of any dross concoction was considered by opium smokers to be a barbaric, last-resort substitute for smoking. Dross was said to be extremely hard on the liver as well as to cause a number of uncomfortable physical side effects, such as chronic constipation. This leads us to yet another piece of vintage slang: the dreaded “yen shee baby.” This was when weeks of constipation brought on by the smoking or eating of dross culminated in a large and painful bowel movement that one imagines was accompanied by teary eyes and much cursing.

Despite knowing the history of dross, I wasn’t too worried about smoking Armand Hoorde’s dross-heavy opium. I saw my all-expenses-paid trip to Europe as a grand holiday—something I might never in my life be able to do again. Why spoil the fun by putting limits on my opium intake? I could always cut back when I got home to Bangkok.

The day after the exhibition opening, Hoorde declared that he was ready to take a road trip to Paris. Hoorde, Pearl, and I climbed into a black SUV and drove south through Belgium, bringing along Hoorde’s basic layout, including the ivory and tortoiseshell pipe, and a quantity of opium. He explained that France was in no way as lax toward drugs as the Netherlands, and that it was not unusual for vehicles coming from Holland to be searched at the French border. Was he joking? That was enough to sour me on the idea of a cross-border trip. Hoorde claimed that he’d done such a journey before and that we didn’t have to worry because we didn’t fit the drug-smuggler profile. If this observation was meant to be a calmative, he quickly reversed it by launching into a story about how he had narrowly avoided being searched at a police roadblock in Paris by acting like a lost tourist.

Because I naturally tend to fall asleep when I’m worried, this information had the effect of knocking me out. When I woke up we were at a rest stop in northern France. Relieved, I asked Hoorde how the border crossing went. He laughed: “Both you and Pearl were sleeping like angels when we passed through the border. The police were there stopping cars today but they were busy searching a carload of Muslims when we came along and they let us drive right through.”

I wasn’t sure if Hoorde was pulling my leg or not, but if it had really been a close call, I didn’t want to know. Suddenly I had a strong urge for a pipe, and I laughingly admitted this to Hoorde. “Oh, don’t worry. We will have a session as soon as we check in to the hotel. It won’t be long now!”

On the expressway into central Paris, Pearl spotted the Eiffel Tower in the distance and pointed it out to me. “Seen it,” I quipped. I had meant to sound cheekily dismissive, but the tone was lost on them. Then, remembering how Hoorde had felt obligated to drag me to a handful of less-than-fascinating tourist sites in Holland, I thought I’d better make clear my complete lack of desire to see the famous cultural landmarks of Paris. No Champs-Élysées or Arc de Triomphe for me; no cathedrals or monuments or museums. A view of the Eiffel Tower from the expressway was more than enough. What I wanted to see were the antiques shops. I wanted to see opium accoutrements that had been carried to France on steamships; pipes that had been slowly seasoned in the sleepy ports of French Indochina; lamps that had last been lit when Brassaï was posing prostitutes around them.

Hoorde agreed. He said that he needed to make some calls after we arrived but promised we would visit all the relevant antiques merchants. “All you have to do is help me out. I have a small favor to ask of you. Just let me confirm things first and then I will fill you in. If everything works out we will be spending many hours at the biggest Asian antiques store in all of France.”

By late afternoon we had checked into Delhy’s Hotel, a small inn hidden down a flight of stairs in an alley off La Place Saint-Michel. Hoorde said he always stayed at this one-star place because it was quiet, cheap, and comfortable. We all shared a room on an upper floor overlooking the alleyway. Before I had even removed my coat, Hoorde and I were scouting the room for a convenient place to recline. The small room was crowded with two beds, so there wasn’t enough space on the floor to smoke. We next tried the beds themselves, but these were too soft. Because we had only a small lamp tray and lacked a wide layout tray, any movement might cause the top-heavy opium lamp with its tall glass chimney to tip over and possibly spill oil on the bedclothes. Finally, we hit upon the idea of using a large coffee-table book as a foundation for the lamp tray.

It worked. As the light outside began to wane, we pulled the curtains across the windows to ensure that nobody from the building opposite could observe our smoking session. To record the moment, Pearl stood on the bed and took photographs from above, one of which I am looking at as I write this. While Hoorde takes a draw on the tortoiseshell pipe, I stare into the glowing lamp, hypnotized.

Later that night we took a walk along the Seine, crossing a bridge to the Île de la Cité. While descending a urine-reeking staircase we were approached by a spike-haired Arab youth who offered to sell us heroin. Instantly, Hoorde and I burst into loud guffaws, causing the drug dealer to step back and look about suspiciously before hurrying away. If only he could have seen that our eyes shone with a sharp twinkle, that rare, pupil-less glimmer that only a century ago would have been instantly recognized in Paris as the mark of an opium smoker.

We strolled along the edge of the island, past young people strumming guitars and drinking in cross-legged circles. There was nothing menacing about the scene, and had I been tipsy with drink I might have been tempted to linger and enjoy their high spirits, but the easy bond that ties opium smokers to one another does not extend to nonsmokers, no matter how sympathetic. We walked by them as we might have strolled under a tree full of songbirds—charmed by the serenade but aware that attempting to interact with such a distant species would likely disappoint. Back at the inn we lit the lamp and smoked until the wee hours. I imagined that the grateful ghost of Jean Cocteau discovered us by following tendrils of fragrance that slipped out the window and wafted over rooftops. Hovering above our session in that little hotel room, he thanked us for bringing the pleasures of opium back to the city once known for its decadent dens in Montmartre.

In a 1910 book about drug use called La drogue: fumeurs et mangeurs d’opium, by Dr. Richard Millant, is a photograph of an opium smoker in a Montmartre den. This wonderful photo is perhaps the best surviving image of a lavish opium-smoking establishment in France. Captioned “Un coin de fumerie Montmartroise,” it depicts a young man, looking slightly effeminate in a full-length robe and with his hair parted down the middle in the style of the 1910s, reclining on a plush couch. A Japanese screen lends privacy as he tends his ample layout, which sits on a coffee table before him. Like the Manhattan opium den described by The New York Times, the room is a mélange of Asia, an Orientalist’s fantasy of the East; not an accurate depiction but an idealized version—which is exactly how opium smokers prefer to view life anyway. The face of this mystery smoker is like a mask—ageless, unlined, serene. It is clear that he is savoring every moment of his vice.

I had seen photographs of Jean Cocteau and knew that he did not look like this smoker in the old book, but when I imagined Cocteau smoking, this was how I saw him: pre-cure and contentedly preparing pipes, reclining on a couch in some Parisian den so willfully outlandish that it could be mistaken for the lobby of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. On that night at Delhy’s Hotel, I was certain Cocteau’s ghost was hanging like an imp somewhere above and watching—perhaps gazing down at us from the same vantage point that Pearl had captured in the photograph.

There is another photo of me taken by Pearl during that session, and in that one I am smiling. Anyone who happened across this photo without knowing the circumstances would assume the subject was a grinning drunk lying on a rumpled bed. But it was at this exact instant that I realized why Cocteau’s cure hadn’t taken. As Pearl snapped the shutter I was celebrating Cocteau’s weakness. Of course he had gone back to the pipe. Was there something so wrong about being hooked? Wouldn’t it simply mean feeling like this all the time?

I toasted Jean Cocteau with a last pipe and then, stunned by the dross, I drifted into a dreamless sleep.

A photograph of an opium smoker in a den in Paris from the book La drogue: fumeurs et mangeurs d’opium by Dr. Richard Millant, published by René Roger, Paris, 1910. (From the collection of Aymon de Lestrange)

Adam Kahn was the godfather of opium antiques in Paris. We found him at his shop, after a long walk along the Left Bank that would have seemed much longer had it been anyplace else. Kahn was dressed in a suit and tie, and I later heard that he was a Holocaust survivor and wore a fresh boutonniere each day as a way of giving thanks for having survived the Nazi death camps. To me he looked presidential, less a merchant than a patient head of state who just happened to be sitting in a room full of opium pipes. Hoorde had brought along a copy of his exhibition catalog, and he and Kahn leafed through it while I browsed the shop. Kahn had generously allowed me to take photographs, and I was trying to contain my excitement and control my shaking hands so I wouldn’t have to use a flash in a shop that surely tolerated very few cameras.

Spotting a rosewood and silver travel kit on a shelf, I spent much time trying to get a sharp shot of the intricate repoussé and chased work that some nameless Vietnamese artisan had hammered into the kit’s silver components. This was the sort of thing I had wanted to see up close, the opium relics brought from Indochina by expatriate French returning home. I am convinced there are more opium antiques in the basements and attics of France than anywhere else in Europe. But the French value their antiques, so when these items appear in shops, prices are always very high. I was lucky Monsieur Kahn allowed me to take photos—there would be no souvenirs for me from his shop.

After visiting more shops in the same neighborhood, Hoorde and I went back to the hotel to prepare for that evening’s activities. Earlier he had given me the details of the favor he wanted to ask me. The “biggest Asian antiques store in all of France” that Hoorde had mentioned the day before was owned by a couple who were dear friends of his and who had supplied him with many opium artifacts over the years. They were also renowned for procuring antiques for some of the most discerning patrons of Asian art in Paris. The dealer couple had asked Hoorde if it would be possible to arrange a demonstration of old-time opium smoking for some of their most favored clients. Hoorde had agreed—this was why the bare-bones layout had been brought along to Paris. But the dealer couple wanted to ensure that their special guests were greatly impressed. The demonstration had to be the event of the year—and something that would be whispered about for years to come.

Hoorde asked me if I would be comfortable preparing pipes before a live audience. I couldn’t think of any reason why not—as long as I was allowed to smoke some of the pipes I was preparing. Hoorde thought we might need one more alternate roller, and asked Maurice, the half-Lao gentleman I had met in Amsterdam, if he, too, could participate. Then Hoorde set about borrowing from a local collector the pieces of paraphernalia that were needed to make two complete layouts.

That afternoon, Hoorde and I drove to the outskirts of Paris for the demonstration. The antiques store was a big, concrete-block box located in a strip mall—not the kind of place one pictures finding in Paris. In fact, the surrounding area could have been mistaken for suburban San Diego. Fortunately, things got better once we entered the building. Inside the cavernous store was a wooden “tea house”—a one-room structure that Hoorde claimed had been shipped from China piece by piece and then reassembled within the store. Here the dealer couple served tea to their clients while discussing the merits of items that were brought in from the larger store “outside.” From inside the tea house it was possible to forget what lay beyond it, especially after the sun went down and the dwindling ambient light through the larger glass-fronted building allowed the store to darken. Before this could happen, however, I had a chance to look over the offerings in the store’s jam-packed display cases.

I had already told myself not to expect any bargains in Paris, but within minutes of browsing the displays I spotted a small, conch-shaped pipe bowl. The conch shell is a Buddhist symbol, and although opium paraphernalia is rife with Buddhist symbolism, I could recall seeing no more than three or four such pipe bowls in several years of collecting. I stood there and debated whether to ask the price. The cups of oolong tea they were serving cost more than what I usually spent on a week’s worth of meals in Bangkok.

I finally got up the nerve to ask and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the bowl was fairly priced at only 190 euros. I paid for the bowl and then showed it to Hoorde, who had been preoccupied and hadn’t seen the transaction. I did this with some dread because, despite Hoorde’s usual joviality, I had gathered that he could be ruthless and unstoppable when there was something he wanted—not to mention the fact that I was traveling on his dime. But I had to show him; it seemed wrong to hide it from him. Upon seeing the bowl his eyes bulged, his nostrils flared, and his face flushed in that way collectors’ faces do when they’ve lost out on something. I quickly offered him the bowl as a gift—and was relieved when his face relaxed into a smile. In the end, he let me keep it.

It was nearing 10 P.M. by the time all the guests had arrived. The dealer couple locked the doors and all the lights were put out, except for two or three dim ones within the tea room. The spectators were mostly older couples, dressed to the nines, which I thought was appropriate: Opium smoking is such a rare ritual that it should be a black-tie affair. The guests occupied three sets of tables and chairs carved from rosewood. Tea was served, and then Hoorde said a few words to them in French before he, Maurice, and I took our places upon bamboo mats that had been spread out on the floor. The layout trays were perfectly arranged, the opium lamps were lit, and soon the unforgettable smell of opium permeated the room as pills were carefully toasted.

As soon as we began smoking, the room became hushed as if some delicate piece of surgery was being performed in an operating theater. It was so quiet that I was sure the spectators could hear the soothing burble of the pipes as vapors were inhaled through ceramic bowls. Hoorde rolled three pipes for himself and then six for me before rolling for himself again. Now and then a whispered comment came from the direction of the tables, but if not for that and the occasional knock of porcelain against rosewood, I might have forgotten that our every movement was being keenly ogled. The opium had its effect on me and I grinned at the curiousness of the circumstances. The reaction of the spectators was similar to what I had seen at sex shows in Bangkok, when set demonstrations of sexual positions (some of them quite acrobatic) invariably caused observers to go silent with astonishment.

After my tenth pipe or so, I decided to try to break the ice by approaching one of the tables. Hoorde urged me on. “Go see if you can interest any of them in trying a pipe.”

I got up slowly and stood still for a moment to keep from getting dizzy. Hoorde’s opium was strong, and it would cause Vientiane-style moonwalking if I wasn’t deliberate in my actions. As I stood there, I saw that everyone was watching me. I walked to one of the tables and, pulling out a vacant chair, slowly lowered myself into it. To my right sat a thin, elderly man, perhaps in his seventies, who was nattily dressed in a billowy white shirt. He stared straight into my eyes, and in his face I saw intense curiosity mixed with apprehension. It was the sort of look you might see in the eyes of someone who had come across a dazed space alien near the site of a recently crashed flying saucer. Partly out of amusement and partly because I’d lived in Thailand so long that it came naturally, I smiled back. His eyes widened with alarm and he immediately looked away from me.

A small porcelain teapot and cup were placed in front of me by one-half of the dealer couple, and she began translating for her guests as she put questions to me about how I felt. At first they looked at me as though I were a talking head in a crystal ball. I found myself suppressing laughter and the temptation to play games with them.

Instead, I answered their queries about dreams and hallucinations and even one question about heightened sex drive. They listened intently and, after I felt they had relaxed a bit, I invited the most inquisitive one, a woman in early middle age who had asked about opium’s reputation as an aphrodisiac, to try a pipe. She smiled at the old gentleman next to me as though challenging him to forbid her and then answered me in English, “Yes, I try.”

Her efforts were watched with great interest by the spectators, who were now away from their tables and standing at the edge of the mat. Only the old gentleman remained seated. Maurice rolled for the woman and coached her on inhalation technique, and on her second try she got the pill to vaporize. After her third pipe another of the guests took her place, and then another. Finally, even the old gentleman lowered himself onto the mat and held the mouthpiece daintily between slender fingers. After he had successfully exhaled the vapors of his first pipe, the others politely applauded. The atmosphere of the tea house became casually genial, like a reunion of old friends, and we all smoked together until nearly three in the morning.