NOTES ON OPIUM TECHNIQUES - by Ami-Jacques Rapin (CERIA 2000)

Introduction

1. Of all the narcotics, opium is probably the one that requires the most
sophisticated device, when consumed in the form of smoke. Unlike drugs
that are ingested, injected, inhaled or even smoked without expert
preparation, taking opium presupposes meticulous preparations and a
proven technique. However, in the representation of the substance, its
mode of consumption plays a determining role, practically as important as
its physiological effects themselves. If opium smoking exerted a real
fascination on the Western imagination at the turn of the 19th and 20th
centuries, it is perhaps as much because of the sensory experiences it
induces as the cultural context to which it refers. At a time when China
probably had more than ten million addicts, part of the circles of Western
opium addicts consider the use of drugs as an art, a process supposed to
introduce those who practice it to the mysteries of a fundamentally exotic
Asia. The Far Eastern Thebaic model imposes itself in Europe, and to a
lesser extent in North America, in the form of a quasi-ritual which
sublimates the technical constraints of the practice of narcotics. All
Western consumers certainly do not share the aesthetic research of a small
elite which will leave a lasting mark in the history of literature, it remains
no less true that opium addiction is systematically associated with Asia in
its narrative or iconographic representations.

2. The role that opium plays in relations between Asia and the West is
naturally not limited to this single attempt at symbolic appropriation of a
practice. On the contrary, we can consider with Philippe Le Failler that the
history of opium alone sums up centuries of contact between civilizations;
it is for this reason that an abundant specialized literature has been
devoted to the history of this drug. Many of the recent summaries,
however, remain elusive on the socio-historical process that led to the
invention of opium smoking. The research notes gathered in this text do
not aim to provide definitive answers, nor even to propose a systematic
study of the question. More modestly, it is a question of discussing the
hypotheses put forward in second-hand works, by relating them to
elements of a "material history" of the uses of the opium poppy. From this
perspective, the technical mastery that presupposes the practice of the
product is more important than drug addiction as such, and the cultural
exchanges that have made it possible to develop a method and tools for
smoking opium present more interest than the commercial exchanges
which supplied the consumer markets. But before approaching the problem
from this angle, it is essential to mention two essential aspects of the
representation of opium smoking. On the one hand, the formation of the
Western imagination of opium -consumed in the form of smoke- which
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imposes a lasting subjective image of the Far Eastern Thebaic model. On
the other hand, the panoply of the opium smoker, as well as the context of
the use of the product, on which rests the fascination that the drug
arouses.

A) A reconstruction of the Far Eastern Thebaic model

3. Contrary to what Barbara Hodgson asserts in her recent history of

opium, the practice of smoking it was not "introduced to the West in the
1850s by European travelers and sailors from China, and by Chinese
immigrants". In Europe, this mode of consumption is indisputably earlier,
as evidenced by the autobiographical short story published by Théophile
Gautier on September 27, 1838, in La Presse. The French writer then
delivers a brief description of an opium pipe, which gives its title to the
story, attesting that this mode of consumption of the substance is then
marginally practiced in the West. It was certainly travelers returning from
the Far East who brought this consumption technique back to their
country of origin -like the doctor Paul Emile Botta who devoted his thesis in
1829 to a drug of which he made himself use- but a few decades earlier
than Barbara Hodgson thinks. On the other hand, it is correct to say that
opium smoking spreads in the societies of Europe and North America in the
second half of the 19th century, and especially the first years of the 20th,
resulting in both an extraordinary enthusiasm among artistic circles and
the proliferation of opium dens in urban centers and port cities. From this
point of view, Théophile Gauthier and his friend Alphonse Karr, also staged
in "La pipe d'opium", must be considered as precursors. But how to explain
this historical discrepancy between the experiments of the product by the
two Parisian opium addicts and the delayed expansion of smoking in
Western societies?

4. First, consider the late spread of opium smoking in relation to other

substances available on the Western narcotics market in the 19th century.
At the time when Théophile Gauthier was translating his experience into
the literary field, other opiates had been popular with consumers for many
years, all categories of the population combined. In the form of laudanum
or pills, opiate preparations were widely used in popular pharmacopoeia,
before a generation of writers found their source of inspiration there.
Coleridge, De Quincey, Poe and Baudelaire are "opium eaters", even if it is
not excluded that the latter occasionally smoked it. Solidly rooted in
Western culture, opiophagy was maintained over the century and only
gradually gave way to a new imported practice, which the still limited
exchanges with the Far East did not allow to impose instantly.

5. Two distinct processes seem to characterize the spread of opium

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smoking in Western countries. As a general rule, Chinese emigration
constitutes the privileged vector for the international propagation of the
practice. The great migratory waves of the second 19th century naturally
affected Southeast Asia, but also the United States, Canada and Australia.
The concomitance of these population flows and the development of this
new form of drug addiction is sufficiently obvious for contemporaries to be
able to estimate that "wherever the Chinese appear, opium appears with
him." In the United States, the thousands of Chinese workers employed in
the construction of the transcontinental railroad brought with them a
practice which soon spread throughout the country. As early as the 1870s,
the American press was alarmed by a phenomenon which would affect, a
few years later, nearly 20,000 people in the city of Chicago alone. In
England, it was also the "disastrous use" of Chinese sailors which, already
in 1853, aroused the concern of a press denouncing the existence of dens
in the East End of London.

6. In France, the process of dissemination of opium smoking seems to

follow a different logic from that of Anglo-Saxon countries. It was not until
the increase in the movement of people between Metropolitan France and
the Indochinese territories that the habit of "drawing bamboo", acquired in
Asia, accompanied the return of sailors, soldiers, merchants or civil
servants to their homeland. If it would undoubtedly deserve to be nuanced,
the description of this process proposed by Georges Miraben in 1911
remains no less instructive. According to this author, it was first the ports
of Toulon and Marseille which were "contaminated" by a practice, which
gradually spread to other port cities, such as Rochefort, Brest and
Cherbourg, before reaching Paris or Lyon. Inevitable fall place for seafarers,
brothels strongly contributed to establishing the use of opium in
metropolitan ports, an additional benefit acquired through contact with
sailors that prostitutes were quick to offer to their entire customer base. In
Toulon, opium became acclimated to France under the slang denomination
of "jam", given to it by local prostitutes, but it did not take long to recover
all its Far Eastern attributes, as soon as it found its thuriferous in part of
the country's intellectual elite.

7. This passage from the common practice of the substance to its literary
representation constitutes a significant factor which partly explains the
fascination of the France of the Belle Époque for opium smoking. From this
point of view, Miraben is mistaken in asserting that this "vice" was
unknown in his country during the thirty years which preceded the time of
his writing. As early as the 1850s, opium was probably smoked in certain
French ports; but it is still a marginal practice, which acquires social
visibility only when the substance ceases to be a simple narcotic to become
a drug charged with meaning.

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8. Between the initial appearance of opium for smoking in French ports and
its great vogue a few decades later, it was another substance -derived from
opium- which dominated the metropolitan narcotics market. The craze
experienced by morphine following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 thus
illustrates the delayed impact of opium smoke in France, while testifying to
the importance of fashion effects in the structuring of the market of
narcotics. Isolated at the beginning of the 19th century, morphine, the
main alkaloid of opium, could be injected as soon as the hypodermic
syringe was developed in the middle of the century. If this analgesic initially
aroused therapeutic enthusiasm, it did not take long to provoke what
Arnould Liedekerke describes as a "surprising vogue, unprecedented in the
annals of drug addiction, and in which one could see the first phase in the
history of modern drugs". In the 1880s, the profile of drug addicts was
sufficiently established in the eyes of contemporaries for each type of drug
to refer to its category of user. A journalist from Le Figaro can write about
this: "Morphine has done the same damage to women as opium has done
to the Chinese. It relieves them of their nerves, consoles them of their
sorrows, and puts them to sleep in dreams of fortune and pleasures." In
other words, opium smoking has not yet emerged from its marginality in
Europe, where the representation of the practice remains closely associated
with its ethnic principle. It was not until the turn of the century that opium
smoking met a public of aesthetes and experimenters who would greatly
contribute to anchoring in Western mentalities an unprecedented
representation of the Far Eastern Thebaic method. Unlike laudanum, ether
or morphine, previously practiced in the West, opium smoking refers to a
cultural context whose connotations go beyond the fields of therapy or
hedonism strictly limited to the effects of products psychotropics that are
consumed. Jean Cocteau, in his Journal of a Detoxification, fully accounts
for the consumer's distinct perception and evaluation of the various
narcotics available on the early 20th century market:

"(...) Opium is the opposite of the Pravaz syringe. It reassures. It reassures

by its luxury, by its rites, by the anti-medical elegance of the lamps, bowls,
pipes, by the secular development of this exquisite poisoning."

9. A technique imported from the Far East, opium smoking does not owe
its success in France to the same causes as in Asia. For the intransigent
critic of drug addiction that is Doctor Dupouy, "our [metropolitan] opium
smokers are taken, so to speak, among the cerebral." And more precisely,
in a specific category of "cerebral", that of "imaginative", "sensitive",
"poets" and "artists". The author attributes to them a motivation linked to
the taste for "strangeness" and the "new", and the only common point
that binds the Western consumer to his Asian counterpart lies in this
consideration, all imprinted with the stereotypes of the time:

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"Opium recruits its enthusiasts among the minds (...) eager for an ideal of
great calm and great rest. Now, this ideal is precisely that of the Oriental,
fatalistic and lazy, rushing through dreams to superhuman nirvana,
enjoying above all the rest of body and mind and cherishing nothing so
much as his divan and his pipe."

10. In Dupouy's ethnocentric perspective, the causes of drug addiction

relate in one case to the distinctive cultural traits of a people, in the other
to a form of deviance of a group of individuals. Western opium addiction,
whether in the colonies or in France, would thus be based on two main
factors, "mental imbalance" and "contagion by example". Notwithstanding
his argumentative errors, Dupouy glimpses the significant elements of the
process of transposition of opium smoking from Asia to the West. From a
phenomenon of mass intoxication in the Far East, the practice is
transformed into an aesthetic vogue in France. Of course, aesthetics alone
cannot explain experimental behavior in the field of narcotics. However, it
would be a mistake to neglect the psycho-sociological foundations that
motivate the consumer to move towards a specific type of product. A
new substance, imbued with its Far Eastern attributes, opium smoking
is part of strategies of distinction that aim as much to establish a
"fictitious" relationship with distant horizons as to take a clear distance
from repulsive normality of the native society. With Claude Farrère, this
perspective gives rise to a pleasant inversion of the analyzes proposed by
Dr. Dupouy:

"I also know that other neighboring intelligences sink simultaneously into
intoxication, and this fills my soul with fraternal joy and affectionate
security. Opium, really, is a motherland, a religion, a strong and jealous
bond which unites men. And I feel more like a brother to the Asians who
smoke in Fou-Tchéou-Road than to the inferior French who vegetate in
Paris where I was born."

11. A fairly elite practice in the West, opium smoking, far from affecting the
entire population, like opiaphagia in England, remains limited to certain
social categories who have directly suffered -sailors, soldiers, civil servants,
merchants , colonists- or indirectly -artists, men of letters, socialites,
prostitutes- the influence of the colonial model of opium. In the French
case, between the phase of precursors and that of the enthusiasm of
metropolitan consumers, smoking is above all an eminently Indochinese
question.

12. Two times mark the initial interest of French authors for opium
smoking. First of all, descriptive approaches -medical monographs,
travelogues and ethnographic sketches- account for the practice in Asian
populations. Then, it becomes a significant fact of society in the overseas
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territories, when it affects European expatriates. Until then, indigenous
opium addiction was at best considered as an Asian specificity, at worst as a
budgetary resource. Its expansion to colonial executives changes the facts
of a problem considered to be all the more worrying as it tends to become
generalized, as shown in an article in the Avenir du Tonkin of March 10,
1891:

"The proportion [of European addicts] is becoming frightening today, and

we cannot anew issue a loud enough cry of alarm (...) The current
situation is too serious; our troubled provinces must not be administered
from the height of a camp bed and between the smoke of two pipes
prepared by a coolie."

13. Five years earlier, the first "colonial" novel devoted to opium shares
this negative vision of the narcotic, by describing the downfall of a French
smoker living in the colonies of Asia. Its author, Paul Bonnetain,
correspondent for Le Figaro in Indochina, sought to highlight the pernicious
effects of drugs through an individual trajectory, and his "Opium" aimed to
equal Zola's "L'Assomoir" in a different register of drug addiction.

14. This prophylactic perspective is by far not shared by writers qualified as

"colonial" -insofar as they have made a stay of varying lengths in the
Far East- who make opium a literary theme in the first years of the
twentieth century. More or less known, but endowed with real talent, they
offer an original vision of smoking, which draws its specificity from the
supposed relationship that the practice would initiate with Asian
authenticity. Among them, Pierre Loti is neither a fan of opium, although
he is an occasional consumer, nor even an author who places the
substance at the heart of his work. However, he introduces an initiatory
dimension to the smoking room, in which the exotic connotation of the
practice is combined with an ability to understand Asian civilization. In "Les
derniers jours de Pékin", as the author and fellow naval officers have put
on Chinese robes at a temple in the city, their opium intake is described in
these terms:

"It is an exquisite opium, it goes without saying, the smoke of which,

spinning in small rapid spirals, immediately made the air heavy, embalming
it. By degrees, it will bring us Chinese ecstasy, oblivion, alleviation,
weightlessness, youth (...) Very late on, the smoke of opium keeps us
awake, in a lucid and confused state in the same time. And we had never
understood Chinese art so well; it is really this evening, one would say,
that it is revealed to us (...) While chatting, we find sequences of words,
formulas, images finally rendering the inexpressible, the underside of
things, which could never have been said."

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15. Three of the major themes of Western opium worship are present
in Loti's lexicon: decorum -"Asian dresses", rapture -"ecstasy",
and discernment -"revelation." But it will be up to other authors to deepen
them, by inventing a ritual dimension to the taking of opium.

16. If Albert de Pouvourville is not the most radical representative of this

intellectual posture, his work has certainly contributed to promoting the
new representation of drugs in his country of origin. An officer in the
French army during the pacification of Tonkin, he successively published
from 1899 -either under his own name or under the pseudonym of
Matgioi- a series of works in which he offered a real theory of smoking.
Pouvourville consumes and theorizes opium in the image of a rite which,
properly respected, opens the way to discernment: it is "like a step towards
occult knowledge and Understanding, and it is in this sense that opium
smoking and its magic ceremonial are sublimated." The verses of "Rimes
chinoises" sum up this transcendent conception of opium smoking:

"Sweet morning regret, sweet evening smile,

Indifferent to praise and contemptuous of blame,
Golden opium, mute adviser, bait
Of all the refined pleasures we loved,
Director of knowledge, of power, of will,
Creator of concepts, generator of flames,
Elder brother of sleep, father of nonchalance,
Ruler of the senses, poison of hearts, support of souls,
Comfort of the dreamer, hope of the continent,
(...)
Wine of the contrite brain, bread of the hungry soul,
Black companion, secret kiss, immanent master,
Come, my friend; come, my mistress; come smoke."

17. But it's in "L'Esprit des races jaunes. De l'opium, sa pratique" that the
art of drawing on the bamboo is best exposed to the eyes of the neophyte,
to the point that the author delivers his "practical advice" to the novice
smoker, so that he is "perfectly practiced and ready for the
experiments." At Pouvourville, the art of smoking is inseparable from a
spiritual quest which pushes him to seek an initiatory path in the
"traditional" thought of Asia. When the fashion for opium spread in Europe
in the first years of the 20th century, a confusion tended to arise between
the end and the means, and the taking of opium ended up condensing in
itself the whole initiatory process of a Pouvourville. Without going into the
detail of a literature analyzed by Arnould Liedekerke, let us quote a
significant feature already encountered in a quotation from Claude Farrère.
Among its Western thurifers, opium smoking is surrounded by a strange
devotion that borders on religiosity:
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"Opium is by turns a 'deity', a 'god', an 'idol', a 'master'; opium addiction a
cult with its rites, its mysteries, its accessories, its symbolism. If the den is
inevitably compared to a chapel, a temple or an altar, opium is "the God"
(...) Object of an astonishing mystique, venerated, exalted, opium has
become part of traditional sacred language. The smoking room is a holy
place, a liturgy of which the needles, the pipes and the lamp are the
indispensable instruments (...)."

18. The psycho-sociological foundations of the ritual are thus based on

the references -real or supposed- that Western consumers attribute to
opium smoking. Opium is more than a drug, it's a gateway to Asia. Its grip
goes beyond the consumption of a narcotic, it is a contact with the
gestures of a thousand-year-old and refined civilization. The place where it
takes place is not a simple place of consumption, it is the reconstruction of
a fundamentally exotic elsewhere. In the collection of short stories he
published in 1904 under the title "Fumée d'Opium", Claude Farrère
perfectly illustrates the Asian substrate of the Western craze for the use of
opium in the form of smoke. Thus, the decor and the atmosphere of the
smoking room constitute the essential framework for the initiation to
opium, while the seasoned smoker can abstract himself from these
pretenses to indulge in his only passion:

"In the past (...) I thought I had to help the good drug by the magnificence
and the oddity of the decor (...) Today, opium has washed away my curious
worries. And I no longer need a complicated setting, or a lascivious woman,
or a talkative philosopher. I smoke alone (...) and I will smoke the same in
my empty room whose walls would be bare."

19. Beyond the context of inhaling smoke, it is the very panoply of the
consumer that refers to an immemorial Asian civilization. However literary
it may be, the following excerpt from Farrère's work conveys an idea that is
still firmly anchored among Western tourists who embellish their stay in
Southeast Asia with a few pipes of opium, namely that they practice one of
the oldest hedonistic methods known to Asian populations:

"In my smoking room, I have five pipes. Because China, source of opium,
source of wisdom, knows five primordial virtues. My first pipe (...) is old and
precious (...) Inside, the coagulated ashes of the opium, the dross bitter
and rich in morphine, were deposited little by little, in thin black films.
There is in it the soul of the pipes of yesteryear. My second pipe (...) is old
and precious (...) It speaks to me minutely of this southern China where I
once spent very sweet years (...). My third pipe (...) is older and more
valuable than the first two. They carved it out of an elephant's tusk. It is
very thick and so heavy that one guesses it was made for the men of
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yesteryear, more robust than us (...) Fertile India teeming from the
Ganges to the Dekkan; learned Tibet, squatting on its snowy steppes;
nomadic Mongolia, where lanky camels trot; innumerable and divine China,
imperial and philosophical China; the ivory pipe mysteriously evokes all of
Asia. Because it is old, older than many civilizations. I know that a Western
Queen -Persian, Tartar, Scythian?- offered it on a historic day to the
Chinese emperor she was visiting. Thirty centuries ago (...) Thirty times a
hundred years... Ivory pipe, how many imperial mouths have pressed you
since that time? (...) But all the same, it's her [my fifth pipe] that I prefer
to all the others. Because it's her that I smoke, not the others, too sacred.
It is she who, each evening, fills me with intoxication, opens for me the
dazzling door of lucid voluptuousness, carries me triumphantly out of life
towards the subtle spheres of opium smokers; -the philosophical and
benevolent spheres inhabited by Hoang-Ti the Emperor of the Sun -Kuong-
Tseu the Perfectly Wise -and the Nameless god who first smoked."

20. Moreover, writers are not alone in propagating this ancestral

representation of smoking. In 1888, Ulysse Pila was able to affirm before
the Political Economy Society of Lyon that "at all times, more or less, the
Chinese have smoked native opium." History and culture would thus be
the basis of an essentially initiatory practice. A singular error of judgement,
to which an enthusiast of oriental traditions like Alexandre [sic] de
Pouvourville does not escape. In reality, opium smoking is a recent
invention on the scale of the history of Far Eastern civilizations. It barely
exceeded two centuries -in its rudimentary form (infra)- at the time when
Western writers took hold of it, and it owes more to the determining
influence of economic and cultural exchanges induced by European
penetration into East Asia than does suggest the staging of its traditional
dimension.

B) The panoply and the technique of the opium smoker

21. Smoking, as practiced in Europe during the Belle Époque, required tools
identical to those used simultaneously in the Far East. It consists of four
main elements -a pipe, a lamp, a needle and a jar containing the product to
be smoked- as well as a series of objects which complete this panoply
without being essential for taking opium. The shape and material of each of
these elements may vary, but they are subject to the functional
constraints of the specific practice for which they were developed.

The pipe.

22. It consists of two distinct parts. First, a bowl which serves as a

volatilization chamber for the opium. It is made of fine-paste terracotta,
"like that of our brown or red clay pipes found in France", wrote Dr. Baurac
9
in 1898, but it can also be made of metal, as Fernand Papillon pointed out
in 1873. Its shape varies. Spherical, semi-spherical or conical, it is hollow,
provided with a sleeve, on its lower base, which adapts to the stem of the
pipe. Its upper face is centrally pierced with a hole of a very small diameter,
approximately one millimeter according to Pouvourville and generally less
than three millimeters. This very small size of the bowl orifice is
characteristic of the Far Eastern opium pipe, and even of the Chinese
method of smoking as opposed to other techniques used in Asia (infra). For
the moment, let us simply say that with each successive take, only a tiny
quantity of opium is consumed and that when the smoker proceeds by
aspiration -after presenting the stove to the heat of a flame- the small
diameter of the Chimney avoids too strong a call for air.

23. After the session, the bowl is disengaged from its support, then its
internal walls are carefully scraped with the aid of a fine curette, in order to
collect the "light, carbonaceous, powdery, bitter mass, which is called
Dross." This deposit, rich in toxic principles, can once again be smoked
or chewed, and it is particularly popular with the poorest smokers who
cannot afford to regularly consume quality chandoo.

24. Second, a suction pipe on which the bowl is housed. This tube, 4 to 5
centimeters in diameter, is 45 to 60 centimeters long. It is crossed by a
channel whose diameter is approximately one tenth of that of the tube.
The end of the pipe, through which the opium smoke is drawn in, has a
mouthpiece which the smoker places in his mouth; as for the other
extremity, it is closed. About forty centimeters from the tip, the stem of
the pipe is pierced with an opening with a metal trim on which the bowl is
housed. The average distance that separates the bowl from the smoker's
mouth owes nothing to chance or aesthetics, since it corresponds to the
path traveled by the smoke, allowing it both to temper and lose some of its
toxicity. Pouvourville gives his expert opinion on this subject:

"The shorter the pipe, the hotter the smoke when it reaches the smoker,
and the less narcotic, but also toxic, principles it gives up on the way. The
pipe with forty centimeters of stem is the best, provided that it does not
exceed four millimeters in width of hollow stem."

25. The material from which the pipe stem is made directly influences the
quality of the opium intake. Bamboo wood is the rule, both because this
common material is easy to obtain and because it becomes impregnated,
over the smoking process, with residues rich in alkaloids deposited by the
smoke inside the pipe. This type of pipe is widespread enough that it gave
its name to a practice known as "the art of drawing the bamboo". Among
the other materials used, Pouvourville considers that metals such as gold,
tin or copper come from an unsavory fantasy, that ebony is detestable and
10
that reptile or shark skins, bone buffalo and cedar root, although sought
after, are inferior to bamboo. Only ivory, tortoiseshell and sugar cane
surpass this last material, but it is still necessary to specify that it is the
use of a pipe included in its duration which will determine the quality of the
smoking experience. Thus, the porosity of sugar cane makes it possible to
quickly obtain the performance sought by the smoker, which is however
followed by a rapid decrease in this effect, also due to the porosity of the
material. Conversely, a new bamboo pipe will not be pleasant to its owner,
while a pipe of the same material which has been used for a long time will
equal ivory or shell pipes.

The lamp.

26. Its form can vary significantly, while respecting its dual function in
taking opium. Its metal base, generally cylindrical, acts as an oil reservoir,
in which bathes a wick raised by a support of variable shape. It is capped
with a conical glass bell, narrowed and open at the end, which functions as
both a chimney and a night light; this glass envelope must exceed the
height of the flame produced by the incandescent wick.

The needle.

27. It consists of a fine steel stylus, about twenty centimeters in length,

the tip of which is tapered. Its function is to allow the seizure of the
substance, in order to shape it first, then to load it into the bowl of the
pipe. While the needle may be silver for the affluent consumer, stubby
umbrella ribs work well for those less fortunate.

The pot.

28. Simple container of the chandoo (smoking opium), its material is not
indifferent, according to the consistency of the latter. For Pouvourville, the
most liquid opiums should be kept in pots of earthenware or horn, the lids
of which should not be screwed in order to allow slow evaporation. As for
the drier opiums, boxes of pewter or ivory are more suitable for their
preservation.

The accessories.

29. They include a spatula to clean the bowl, an ashtray to collect the dross
or opium residue, spare bowls on a display, scissors to cut the wick of the
lamp, a damp sponge to cool the bowl or to clean it, a scale to weigh the
opium and a tea service, a drink which frequently embellishes the smoking
room and allows the consumer to quench their thirst.

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The technique.

30. The method of smoking opium varies considerably according to the

regions and the periods considered. It is necessary to distinguish, on the
one hand, the Far Eastern technique relating to the panoply previously
described, as well as a variant reported in 1873 by Fernand Papillon and, on
the other hand, all the more rudimentary methods of aspiration opium
smoke, as practiced in other Asian countries.
31. In the classic Thebaic model, taking opium begins with the preparation
of the product to be smoked and the loading of the pipe. The needle is
immersed in the container containing the chandoo, then the small quantity
of the substance at its end is subjected to the flame of the lamp, in order
to deprive it of its excess humidity by desiccation. The drop of opium swells
under the effect of heat and, when the substance has softened, it can be
shaped on the edge of the bowl, before being placed in its upper opening,
by withdrawing the needle sharply "by a double twisting movement in two
directions." The pellet thus loaded is pierced centrally with the hole left by
the needle, which will prevent the bowl from being completely obstructed
by the chandoo. Although Pouvourville estimates that the quantity of
opium charged in the pipe for a catch is indifferent and varies according to
the size of this pipe, it is possible to estimate this quantity at 15 or 30
centigrams. To reach it, the smoker -or the person who prepares his pipe
for him- repeatedly plunges the needle into the chandoo, in order to
increase the volume of the initial drop.

32. Next, the smoker -lying on his side, his head supported by a pillow-
places the bowl of his pipe above the glass of the lamp. The pipe is tilted to
the side, the bowl subjected to the heat of the flame, without however the
temperature of the latter being too high, so as not to carbonize the opium.
The opium addict can then slowly inhale the smoke which he rejects
through the nostrils, most often lying on his back. The small diameter of
the bowl chimney, adapted to the size of the opium pellet, allows this
prolonged aspiration by only allowing the passage of a small volume of air.
It also prevents the heat source from being subjected to a sudden inrush of
air with unfortunate consequences for the heating of the chandoo. The
number of suctions needed to complete a pipe varies among observers. For
Dr. Baurac, "a single aspiration is enough for good smokers", while Charles
Lemire notes that Cochin-Chinese consumers proceed by "twenty
aspirations". In fact, the size of the pipe and the quantity of opium
introduced into the bowl exert their influence concurrently with the
experience of the smoker. In the same vein, the number of daily pipes
varies according to the trajectory of the consumer, the quality of the
opium, its method of preparation and previous uses of the pipe. Let us
simply point out that a novice will begin with a limited number of pipes and
that this will increase according to his experiments: if a single pipe is
12
enough for Théophile Gautier to provoke his first dreams of an opium
addict, Jean Cocteau estimates that a dozen pipes daily cigarettes endanger
the health of the consumer less than a glass of cognac or three cigars, Dr.
Baurac puts forward the range of 40 to 80 pipes and the case of a
European smoker taking 100 pipes a day and mentioned by the
Indochinese press. As for the numbers of "three, four hundred pipes each
day; who knows?" mentioned by Farrère, they must no doubt be
considered as part of literary expression.

33. All of the operations that precede the inhalation of opium smoke -from
the preparation of the pellet to the heating of the bowl and the loading of
the pipe- require a dexterity which can only be acquired by practice.
Pouvourville considers in this respect that "the agility of the fingers, the
sureness of the glance, the estimation of the cooking time are qualities
which must be exercised naturally, and which can only be acquired with a
long habit. We will burn many drops, we will waste many opiums before we
succeed and attach to the bowl, at the first attempt, a pipeful truly worthy
of being smoked." For this reason, the neophyte must absolutely count on
the assistance of a preparer, whose assistance will not be neglected even
by the seasoned smoker.

34. This device responds to the precise gestures that make it possible to
switch from chandoo to its inhalation, and as Pouvourville points out, "Nor
should we believe that it is the wealth or the originality of the smoker that
makes him seek of a special shape or material. Not one of them, not one of
the movements which handle them, is indifferent in the result to be
obtained."

35. This technique has probably been practiced in China and Southeast
Asia at least since the first half of the 19th century. It is what spread in
Western countries in the second half of the 19th century, which is
practiced in France during the Belle Époque and which is still in use among
consumers at the beginning of the 21st century.

36. In 1873, Fernand Papillon reported in the "Revue des deux mondes"
an interesting variant of the technique just described. While the pipe he
describes conforms in all respects to the classic Chinese pipe, its method of
preparation and consumption differs somewhat from the previous one.
According to this author, a special "spoon" is used to draw the opium
extract from its container. This extract is then applied to the edges of the
central opening of the bowl of the pipe to "form a kind of bead", which is
directly presented to the flame of the lamp, so that "the opium burns while
bubbling and filling the inside of the pipe with smoke." This operation has
the effect of blistering the opium which then obstructs the chimney of the
bowl. Smokers remedy this inconvenience "by passing, after each
13
inhalation, a needle through the middle of the swollen mass, and thus
reestablish the communication of the air with the interior of the pipe." The
duration of consumption of a pipe is lengthened accordingly to
approximately five minutes, at the rate of twelve to fifteen aspirations. The
originality of this method does not really lie in the loading of the pipe, since
some forty years later the Manager of the Saigon Opium Factory also
described the technique consisting in making the opium adhere to the
edges of the bowl opening. It is indeed at the level of the preheating and
the heating of the pellet that a distinction is established with respect to the
method previously described. According to Papillon, this variant ignores the
prior desiccation of the chandoo and its shaping for the loading of the pipe.
Moreover, everything suggests that the opium is subjected to more intense
heat than in the previous technique. Indeed, Papillon specifies that the
flame is "sucked in so as to direct it on the opium", then that this flame is
"used to burn the narcotic extract", whereas Pouvourville clearly indicates
that the upper end of the the glass opening of the lamp, "through which
the smoker cooks the opium", allows air and heat to pass, "but noticeably
exceeds the level of the flame."

37. Is the technique described by Papillon in 1873 a pure variant of the

classical Thebaic method or should it rather be considered as a less
elaborate practice, the improvement of which leads precisely to this
method? Although the two techniques coexist in Asia during the 19th
century, it is quite plausible that they do not date from the same period
and that one was temporarily maintained, despite the improvements made
by the other. Indeed, the preheating of the pellet of opium, as well as the
process aiming to avoid its carbonization at the time of the aspiration push
to consider the method described by Baurac, Pouvourville and Miraben as a
genuine improvement of the smoking process. In this order of idea, it is
obvious that the classic Thebaic method can only be the historical
culmination of an experimental phase, during which the technique of
inhaling opium smoke was gradually developed and perfected.

38. Comparatively, the other smoking methods that coexist with the Far
Eastern model appear much less sophisticated. In India -a country where
opium consumption is largely by ingestion- the panoply of the smoker, the
method of preparation of the substance, as well as the smoking technique
are in no way similar to the Chinese method. Although chandoo is also
smoked in this country -mostly by hard-core consumers or Chinese
emigrants- the most widely practiced substance is known as Madak. It is
produced by mixing raw opium with water, which is boiled and stripped of
its impurities which rise to the surface. Cooking is continued until the
formation of a thick mass in suspension which is filtered through a piece of
cloth, then mixed with leaves of Acacia arabica, Phylanthus emblica, Acacia
leucophloea or Piper betel. The dough thus formed is rolled into balls, ready
14
to be smoked. The madak smoking technique gives rise to two somewhat
different descriptions. For Ram Nath Chopra, the dumpling is slightly
heated and placed in the bowl of a pipe, before introducing a piece of
burning coal. At this moment, the smoker performs several inspirations
while inhaling deeply the smoke. Miraben, for his part, specifies that the
bowl of the pipe contains a grid on which is placed the opium, then the
coal, above which a container containing tobacco is adjusted. No precision
is brought on the pipe itself, except that it does not resemble the Chinese
pipe at all and that it does not require the supine position. It is likely that,
in one case, it is an ordinary pipe -like the small clay pipes mentioned by
Harald Tamps-Lyche in his recent contribution on the use of opium among
the Rajputs- and perhaps, in the other, a water pipe.

39. Like the Middle East, waterpipe smoking is also common among opium
addicts in South West Asia. In the frontier regions of Pakistan, madak is
consumed in a hookah, with the opium smoke passing through the water
tank before being inhaled. More rudimentary than the classical method,
these different techniques provide clues to the experimental phase which
led, in the Far East, to the invention of the tool previously described. The
use of adjuvants, like the use of a material device that is not specific to the
opium smoking, lead to the consideration that the process of developing
the Far Eastern Thebaic model is inseparable from consumption of other
narcotic substances, as well as related techniques. The opium smoking
would thus result from the progressive fusion of various uses and different
products; a fusion which, in a precise case, but promised to be widely
diffused, leads to the isolation of opium from any adjuvant. This thesis is
based on an idea clearly expressed by Marie-Claude Mahias:

"When one is interested in the consumption of psychotropic products, it is

difficult, if not impossible, to consider them in isolation. All narcotics
available in a place, at a time, have been associated in particular ways
according to social groups. A new product is adopted by introducing a
different taste, smell, effect into a known mode of consumption."

40. In this perspective, it is useful to return to an example mentioned

above. Théophile Gautier smokes neither in the manner nor with the tools
of a Pouvourville half a century later. His pipe is made of cherry wood, it is
equipped with a porcelain stove, the smoker drips the opium into it which
"flares up" after being heated by a candle. A pioneer of opium smoking in
France, Gautier consumed the substance according to the methods specific
to his time and culture.

C) An early invention?

41. Until the 1960s, a study devoted to the origin of opium smoking could
15
entirely relate to the Asian beginnings of the classic Thebaic model, roughly
situated between the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth
centuries. At that time, however, Greek researchers advanced the
iconoclastic hypothesis of a considerably older invention, moreover not
located in Asia, but in the Mediterranean basin. Initially, the main defender
of this thesis based himself on his interpretation of archaeological
discoveries made on the sites of Gazi in Crete and Mycenae in Greece.
According to Pan Kritikos, two tube-shaped vases found in Gazi and dating
from the Minoan era could serve as containers for inhaling opium. The first,
which has no bottom, is described as an "open pipe" which could have been
placed on a brazier. Inside, a stone or a tile would have been placed directly
on the coal and, once preheated, the opium would have been spread there,
the vapors of which concentrated by the chimney of the vase would have
been inhaled by the Cretan consumer:

"Probable on the pipe place over the fire (...) a tile would be placed on
which, when well heated, opium would be poured; the vapors rising from it
would be absorbed by nasal inhalation."

42. The second vase (a "closed pipe") has a bottom and holes in its lower
part. Charcoal would have been placed inside and a tile placed, either
directly on the heat source or on the top of the vase; the lower
perforations being intended to produce a draft in the chimney. The
inhalation process would be identical to the previous one. Kritikos
completes his theory by assuming that the long metal pins, with stylized
poppy heads, discovered on several Mediterranean archaeological sites -
including that of Mycenae- could be used for purposes comparable to those
of contemporary opium needles:

"We suggest to archaeologists that it would be interesting to find out

whether the long metal pins (...) were used as instruments for carrying the
opium to the source of heat an producing vapours, as is done today. If so,
it would be natural to use metal pins (needles) of greater length than those
used today in order to insert the opium in the pipe for direct heating and
vapor inhalation."

43. Secondly, Kritikos revised his theory on the basis of a discovery made
in Cyprus in the early 1970s at the site of Kition. Among the objects
unearthed in an excavation dating back to 1220-1190 BC, a cylindrical
vase and an ivory "pipe" revive speculations relating to an ancient opium
smoking. If the tubular container did not bring new clues compared to
those found on the Gazi site, the discovery of a 13.5 centimeter ivory tube
-provided with an orifice on its upper face, communicating with a central
channel- could not fail to reinforce the conviction of Kritikos.

16
44. Consulted by Vassos Karageorghis on this object, Kritikos offers the
following interpretation:

"The sanctuaries of Kition have produced not only the same cylindrical
vessel with two perforations at the lower part and the pile of charcoal as at
Gazi, but furthermore a new element, suitable for smoking, a cyclindrical
pipe. We may, therefore, suggest the use of opium at Kition, as at Gazi,
and ever further, that the smoke of opium was inhaled at Kition through a
pipe which bears obvious signs of dark stains caused by fire round the
vertical perforation through which smoke entered (...) The cylindrical clay
vessel with two perforations at its lower part was used as a receptacle for
burning charcoal on which opium was placed; we may also suggest that
opium was not placed directly on burning charcoal but indirectly, on a clay
plaque, which, having been heated on this charcoal, could cause smokes
from the opium which was thrown on it. The ivory cylindrical pipe was not
used for burning opium on it like the smoking of cigarettes; this fashion of
smoking is of a much later date. The way of smoking opium today is also
the same, consisting of inhaling the smoke through a pipe of a more
perfected type. It is probable that during the act of smoking the vertical
opening of the pipe which has traces of dark stains all round it was brought
above the cylindrical clay vessel in which opium was burning; the actual
smoking (inhaling of smoke) was done through the perforation at the
terminal of the pipe. The function of the two perforation at the lower part
of the cylindrical vessel was to create a draft of air which keep the charcoal
burning."

45. How did Kritikos come to formulate such an audacious and fragile
thesis? In reality, his reasoning is based on a petition of principle and two
series of questionable inferences. First, he posits that written sources from
antiquity demonstrate that the method of opium inhalation was practiced
at that time:

"The above extracts from classical authors allow the following conclusions
to be drawn (...) That the use of opium as an hypnotic drug taken by nasal
inhalation of vapors – the most suitable method of inducing sleep – was
known, apart from its use through internal, oral consumption and external
application."

46. Next, he seeks to relate archaeological objects likely to be used to carry

out this type of practice with discoveries made on the same site and
corroborating his hypothesis: at Gazi, stylized representations of poppy
capsules and traces of coal, at Kition a vase identical to that of Gazi and
also traces of coal. Finally, he attempts to reconstruct the supposed uses of
these objects. However, even if it is up to the specialists of Antiquity to
settle the question, it seems to me possible to put forward a series of
17
objections, both on each of the particular arguments and on their
articulation.

47. In the first place, the written sources cited by Kritikos in his article are
imprecise and -of course- all date from a time well after the objects
discovered in the archaeological excavations. The first reference is
presented in these terms:

"Diagoras (third century B.C.) (...) states that Epistratos (...) disapproved of
the use of opium for ear-ache and eye ailments (...), whereas Mnisidemos
considered that the only proper use of opium was 'by inhalation for
inducing sleep, all other uses being harmful'. Dioskourides adds that
experience proves this to be untrue."

48. As for the second:

"Galen states, 'Opium is the strongest of the drugs which nimb the sens
and induce a deadening sleep; its effect are produced when it is soaked in
boiling water, taken up on a flock of wool and used as a suppository; at the
same time some can be spread over the forehead and in the nostrils' (...)."

49. In one case, details are not available either on the substance (is it
really raw opium or a poppy decoction widely used in ancient
pharmacopoeia) or on the method of inhalation. In the other case, the
description of the mode of preparation of the opium is certainly most
interesting, since it is not without evoking later techniques, but one cannot
consider that it is then a question of inhaling the substance in the proper
sense of the term.

50. Surprisingly, Kritikos only briefly mentions Hippocrates, without

mentioning a passage from his work which would have supported his
thesis. Indeed, the Greek doctor refers not only to many poppy decoctions,
but also to a method of inhalation:

"Fumigations by which the dies are purged if they are hard: very sweet cut
sweet wine (...) If the intense pains occur suddenly and there are failures,
rose leaf, cinnamon, pure myrrh, netopon, juice of poppy, make pellets of
the weight of a drachma out of it, put them on a shard of a jug, and when
it is red, use it in fumigation."

51. Note however that in Hippocrates: 1- Inhalation is only one of the

therapeutic modes of poppy consumption and that all the other examples
given refer to decoctions. 2- Fumigation is only recommended in a very
specific case of disease. 3- The inhaled substance is not raw opium, but a
preparation in which it enters only as an adjuvant. 4- There is no mention
18
of the use of any objects likely to serve as a chimney during inhalation.
More generally, it is precisely the absence in ancient literature of any
reference to a specific device for the opium den that constitutes one of the
main weaknesses of Kritikos' thesis. Aware of the problem, he tries to work
around it with the following argument:

"No information has come down to us regarding the method of opium

smoking practiced in antiquity, possibly because the use of the drug,
primarily euphoric, remained hidden behind the walls of sanctuaries, where
many capsule-shaped objects have been found. Perhaps opium vapors were
used at prophetic shrines in the process of inducing vaticination. Such a
use of opium may provide the reason why physicians of classical antiquity
did not describe the method of taking opium 'by nasal inhalation' (...)."
52. But is it not just as likely to assume that the ancient authors do not
mention the opium smoking, because the processes which allow it are not
in the possession of the men of that time? Pliny the Elder provides a clue
on this subject by attesting that the experiment consisting in subjecting
raw opium to a source of heat has been practiced since antiquity, but that
the inhalation of the smoke produced by its combustion has obviously not
been practiced:

"Diagoras and Erasistate (...) forbade the instillation of it [opium, that is to

say the juice of the 'black poppy' put into loaves and dried] (...) But later its
use was not condemned in the famous preparation called dia codyon. One
also prepares with the plundered seed lozenges which one takes in milk to
sleep (...) In the gout, one makes some applications with woman's milk,
the leaves also are used in this way; likewise in vinegar for erysipelas and
wounds. However, I cannot approve of putting it in eye drops, and even
less so in potions known as lexipyrets, peptics and celiacs. However, the
black poppy is given in wine against celiac affections (...) The first sign of
the quality of opium is its odor -it is indeed impossible to bear that of pure
opium; the second is that, when lit by a lamp, it gives off a pure flame and
spreads its odor only after being extinguished."

53. On the one hand, the modes of preparation and consumption of opium,
on the other a method of testing its quality. Let us sum up by saying that
the written sources of Antiquity demonstrate that the harvesting of poppy
juice was practiced, that the technique of cooking and filtering raw opium
was mastered for the preparation of decoctions (Galien), that the mention
of inhalation of the substance concerns opium only in the form of an
adjuvant (Hippocrates) and that the exposure of raw opium to a source of
heat does not refer either to a therapeutic practice or to hedonistic use
(Pliny the Elder).

54. Secondly, the connections made by Kritikos between the various

19
objects found in the archaeological excavations, however legitimate they
may be, remain purely hypothetical. The simultaneous presence of charcoal
residues, representations of poppy capsules and tubular vases in Gazi in no
way proves a functional connection between its elements. The author
certainly argues that one of the Gazi vases bears a remarkable
resemblance to containers discovered in Java and used for inhaling opium
vapours, but the fact remains that the tubular shape is sufficiently
elementary to be widespread and multifunctional. In the case of the Kition
finds, it is only because Kritikos postulates that one of the cylindrical
vessels possesses the same function as those at Gazi that he infers that
the ivory object found nearby may be a "pipe" of opium.

55. Third, the author's extrapolations of ancient opium smoking technique

seem hazardous, at least as far as Kition's "pipe" is concerned. On the one
hand, the hypothesis relating to the positioning of the pipe above the
tubular vessel does not withstand ergonomic criticism. Indeed, the ivory
object having a length of 13.5 centimeters, it follows that its upper orifice
is located 3.75 cm from its hollowed mouth (see diagram above). However,
it is not clear why this orifice -supposed to be placed on a vase with a
diameter of 19 centimeters on its upper part- is so close to the opening
through which the smoker would inhale the vapors emanating from the
vase and passing through the pipe channel. Or in other words, why make a
"pipe" too short to rest on the circumference of the "chimney", but
elongated to the point that two-thirds of its length is of no functional
interest? Continuing this demonstration, it is worth recalling that in
Kritikos' first hypothesis, the function of the chimneys formed by the
tubular structures found at Gazi is to concentrate the opium vapors with a
view to inhaling them. Contrary to all logic, his second hypothesis is based
on the idea that the upper orifice of the pipe - which has a diameter of
about 1 centimeter - serves as a diversion channel for a "chimney" with a
diameter of 19 centimeters. Based on these details, it is easy to imagine
the proportion of smoke passing through the channel of the "pipe"
compared to that escaping from the "chimney".

56. Without denying the interest of the works of Kritikos, Papadaki and
Karageorghis, it nevertheless seems difficult to consider that they provided
the demonstration of an ancient opium smoking. In this regard, L.D.
Kapoor was probably misguided in taking up without critical perspective the
conclusions of Greek researchers in his landmark study on the opium
poppy. The written sources remaining, to my knowledge, silent on the
subject -all civilizations combined, from antiquity until the end of the 17th
century- it is still possible to consider opium smoking as a Far Eastern
invention, aroused by the new cultural exchanges which developed in this
region of the world at the time mentioned above.

20
D) Genesis of the Far Eastern Thebaic model

57. In 1938, Dr Gaide published a particularly stimulating article in the

"Bulletin des Amis du Vieux Hué" on the history of poppy and opium in
Asia. Even today, this text remains relevant to address the question of the
origin of smoking in the Far East. Based on the periodization proposed by
Li-Shi-Chang in 1578 in his work "La Materia Medica", Gaide distinguishes
three periods in the history of the opium poppy in China. From the 7th to
the 11th centuries of our era, only the seed of the plant was used. From
the 12th to the 15th centuries, the medicinal properties of the poppy
capsule were discovered and the preparation of decoctions, either of the
capsule or of the whole plant, was practiced. Finally, from the 15th
century, "real" opium -that is to say the raw opium resulting from the
scarification of the capsule - was imported by the "Mahometans", before
experiencing great success in the Chinese pharmacopoeia.

58. The late discovery of opium poppy juice should be noted here, for which
the Chinese are clearly indebted to Islamic civilization, just as they had
been for the introduction of the plant a few centuries earlier. Although Arab
merchants first brought the opium poppy to China, then later distributed
raw opium there, it was other, more complex commercial exchanges that
would allow the advent of a fourth historical phase during which the opium
smoking will spread in the Far East. In China and South-East Asia, smoking
is massively supplanting the use of eating the substance, unlike India
where the latter will be maintained over the long term.

59. There is today a broad consensus to affirm that the use of opium in the
form of smoke "proceeds from that of tobacco", according to the expression
of Louis Dermigny, thus reducing to nothing the suppositions on the
thousand-year-old practice of smoking in Asia or on its
"traditional" dimension. Imported from the Americas, tobacco did not
spread to East Asia, via the Philippines, until the turn of the 16th and 17th
centuries. The success it meets does not take long to cause its cultural
assimilation, to the point that a few generations later, it is considered a
native plant. Long before opium, it was banned in Chinese edicts of 1637
and 1643. While it is impossible to precisely date the innovation of mixing
tobacco and opium to smoke them, Engelbert Kaempfer's testimony
confirms that the practice was widespread in Java at the end of the 17th
century. In 1712, the German physician and navigator published the
observations he was able to make during his travels in the years 1680-
1690, which took him from Persia to Japan, via Southeast Asia. While he
was able to observe that opiophagy was widespread in Persia, he notes that
the inhabitants of Java smoked at the time of his passage through the
island (i.e. in 1689) tobacco leaves which they had previously soaked in a
solution of opium, then presumably dried and rolled. On this occasion,
21
Kaempfer also describes the first opium smoking which, to my knowledge,
is mentioned in the sources:

"Opii etiam externus utus est apud nigritas: nam eodem aqua diluto
Nicotiam iníiciunt, ut accensa caput vehementius turbet. Vidi in Java
tabernas levidenses ex arundine, in quibus id genus tabaci hauriendum
exponebatur praetereuntibus. Nulla per Indiam merx majori lucro
divenditur in Batavis, quam Asiuum, quo career adsueti non possunt, nec
potiri, nisi navibus Batavorum ex Bengala & Choromandela advecto."

[Opium is also used externally for blackheads: for with the same diluted
Nicotia water, Nicotia is injected, so that when it is kindled, it makes the
head shake more violently. I have seen in Java shops made of reeds, in
which this kind of tobacco was exhibited to passers-by. No commodity
throughout India is sold to the Dutch with more profit than that of the
Asiatics, which they cannot be accustomed to do without, nor can they
obtain, unless brought by Dutch ships from Bengal and Choromandela.]

60. As can be seen, it is not yet a question of raw opium which would be
mixed with tobacco, but of an opium solution, nor of instruments specific to
opium smoking, but of a kind of cigars.

61. Before wondering about the continuation of the process which leads to
the Thebaic Far Eastern model, it is appropriate to examine the conditions
which allowed the acclimatization in the Dutch Indies of the specific mode
of smoking described by Kaempfer. For Louis Dermigny, "the movement
still comes from the East", that is to say from India, and it is the Dutch
who extend it to the Far East. This hypothesis would explain not only the
expansion of the practice in Java, but also its introduction to Formosa and
Foukien during the course of the 17th century. It is quite possible, but one
cannot help noting that specialists in the history of narcotics in India are
extremely circumspect on the question of the origin of the opium smoking
in this country. For Ram Nat Chopra:

"Even up to the beginning of the 19th century no writer has recorded the
smoking of opium in India, although it prevailed in China. Tobacco-smoking
was introduced into India after the 16th century and it is not evident that,
in the case of India as of China, opium-smoking was simply an outcome of
tobacco-smoking. It is uncertain how the habit was brought into India but,
fortunately, it never assumed such a threatening aspect as it did in China.
The Royal Opium Commission of 1893 described the habit as
'comparatively rare and novel in India'."

62. As for Marie-Claude Mahias, she observes that the time and the
context of the introduction of the opium smoking in India raise "a n
22
immense question", without being able to resolve it. That tobacco was
widespread in India prior to its wide spread in Southeast Asia is one thing.
That the opium introduced into Java by the Dutch came from Bengal is
another. That the opium smoking in the Far East is an Indian import is a
third thing which deserves a documented demonstration.

63. Be that as it may, Kaempfer's testimony provides reliable information

on the primitive technique of opium smoking. From the moistened tobacco
leaf to the consumption of raw opium, the process which leads to the
classic Thebaic method probably passes through an experimental phase
which Dr. Gaide summarizes in these terms:

"When the Chinese went to the lands of the Malay Archipelago, they
indulged in this method of smoking, and when they returned to their
homeland, they contrived to perfect this method more and more. They
added to the tobacco, hitherto imported from the Philippines, a certain
quantity of poppy-head extract, increasing the doses to the point of
completely eliminating tobacco and replacing it with opium. It was not until
the end of the 18th century that the use of the opium pipe spread in China
to a few territories on the southern coasts."

64. Everything leads one to think, in fact, that Chinese emigrants from
Southeast Asia played a role alongside the Dutch in the spread of smoking
at the regional level. As early as the 17th century, it was Chinese
merchants who ensured the distribution of Indian opium in Java, and how
could one not imagine that their commercial networks contributed to
spreading the new practice on the coasts of the China Sea? It is up to
sinologists to document the question, just as it is up to them to specify
under what conditions, at what pace, in what form and with what tools the
opium smoking entered the Celestial Empire. For my part, I will limit myself
to reporting Dermigny's observation, which stipulates that the opium
smoking has long retained a "marginal" aspect in mainland China, and
that the Manchu regime only discovered its existence when taking Amoy
in 1683. Furthermore, it seems likely to me that the first edict prohibiting
opium smoking, proclaimed in 1729 by Emperor Yung Cheng, does not
strictly speaking concern the classic Thebaic model, as it was previously
described, but an intermediate mode of smoking, derived from the
technique observed by Kaempfer in Java forty years earlier. In support of
this thesis, we can cite the testimony of Huang Yu-pu, sent by the imperial
government to the island of Formosa in the middle of the 18th century. I
quote here the translation appearing in Martin Booth's work, which
unfortunately does not provide any reference relating to this quote:

"Opium for smoking is prepared by mixing hemp and the grass cloth plant
with opium, then cutting them up small. The mixture is boiled with water,
23
and the preparation mixed with tabacco. A bamboo tube is also provided,
the end of which is filled with coir fibres. Many persons collect the opium to
smoke it mixed with tobacco alone."

65. The practice of mixing tobacco and opium seems to have continued in
China even throughout the eighteenth century and even into the early
years of the nineteenth. In 1816, Doctor Abel Clarke wrote about this:

"No opium is exposed in the shops probably because it is a contraband

article, but it is used with tabacco in all part of the Empire. The Chinese,
indeed, consider the smoking of opium as one of the greatest luxuries; and
if they are temperate in drinking, they are often excessive in the use of
this drug. They have more than one method of smoking it: sometimes
they wrap a piece of solid gum in tobacco and smoke it from a pipe with a
very small bowl, and sometimes they steep fine tobacco in a strong
solution of it, and use it in the same way."

66. This quotation presents a double interest from the point of view of the
material history of the opium smoking. On the one hand, it tends to show
that the method described by Kaempfer during his stay in Java constitutes
the common matrix of the different smoking techniques practiced in Asia.
From this point of view, the classic Thebaic model is very similar to a
sophistication of the practice of opium in the form of smoke and cannot be
considered as a simple variant of the other methods described above. On
the other hand, Dr. Clarke's account clearly indicates the historical
permanence of the tobacco-opium mixture in imperial China, which would
therefore not have converted to the use of chandoo until late.

67. The transition from the Javanese model to the classical model could
historically only take place through a decisive modification of the
instrumental process for inhaling the smoke. In order for smokers to be
able to gradually abandon the use of tobacco in favor of opium alone, they
still had to have an instrument which would allow them, first of all, to
consume the mixture, then, secondly, to exclude one of its components. In
his article, Dr. Gaide proposes a series of hypotheses formulated in China to
explain the introduction of this first opium pipe in the country:

"According to a treatise on Buddhist morality, the invention of the pipe

would be due to the monks, Buddhist pilgrims returning from India who
brought back to their compatriots both the pipe and the technique of
smoking. We will not discuss this somewhat surprising assertion, let us
admit it, on the part of religious, whose rule is so contrary to all servitude.
According to the Chinese delegate to the first international conference in
Shanghai, it was the Spaniards who, by introducing tobacco into China,
learned to smoke it incorporated into opium. We know that the Chinese
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later abandoned this mixture to use pure opium (...) There is another
version, according to which a woman from Canton, named Ying-Sien, was
intrigued, one day, by the smell of burnt opium, as well as by the effects
felt by breathing in this smoke; she would have conceived the idea of
absorbing opium in this form and making the process known. It is added
that it was also she who contrived to make the first clay bowls, those that
are still referred to today under her name (...) Some Chinese authors take
pains to recall that, towards the end In the Ming dynasty (1628), the use
of chewing and sucking opium was widespread in Canton, in Foukien, as
well as in the other provinces bordering the sea. In the beginning, the
mode of smoking using a tube was not yet known; this custom would have
originated in Foukien, among a few rich families who perfected the pipe,
innovated the bowl and soon possessed lamps, bowls and pipes, which they
kept hidden for a long time and ignored by the vulgar."

68. These theses, apparently antagonistic, are not necessarily

incompatible, since it is considered that they contain only elements of
truth.

69. The first of these may well refer to the importation from India, not of
the classic opium pipe, but of the water pipe which was introduced into
that country in the early years of the seventeenth century. A few decades
later, the German traveler C. Schweitzer describes the use by the Chinese
of Batavia of such water pipes, named "Gurr-Gurr". Other pipes of this type
are also described by S. de Laloubère during his trip to Siam at the end of
the 17th century. However, there are some reasons to think that the
opium pipe derives directly from the water pipe (infra).

70. The second thesis, incriminating the Spaniards, denotes the essential
role played by tobacco in the process which led to the invention of the
opium smoking. Along with tobacco, the Europeans introduced the use of
the pipe to Asia, an instrument which quickly underwent a series of
modifications adapting it to its host societies. The pipe changes material
and shape, it is perfected. The simplest are in bamboo, others in ivory,
ebony or metal. Porcelain, metal, ivory or jade mouthpieces are then added
to the stem of bamboo pipes. According to Dr. Gaide, the raw opium was
initially smoked in one of these pipes reworked in the Asian fashion, and
more precisely in a Chinese copper pipe (below).

71. The third version suggests that the experimental process of opium
smoking entered a decisive phase on the southern coasts of China, at the
time when the process of smoking pure opium was being developed, a
process involving a technical adaptation of smoking instruments. In this
respect, the invention of an earthenware bowl, specifically adapted to the
consumption of opium fragments, is unquestionably the decisive stage on
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the path leading from the Javanese model to the classic Thebaic model.

72. Finally, the fourth thesis suggests that this innovation was not sudden,
but on the contrary that the panoply of the smoker was instituted only
very gradually, to the point of giving rise to the suspicion of its
dissimulation by its initiators.

73. Is it certain, as Dr. Gaide asserts, that the first pipe used for this
purpose was "none other than the tobacco pipe (a long Chinese copper
pipe), in which people began to smoke pure opium"? The assertion is
credible, insofar as one considers the technical apprenticeship of the opium
smoking as a phase of inevitable trial and error, of multiple experiments,
during which several methods, various instruments, were subjected to the
test of the practice. It is too dogmatic if it implies an exclusion of the
waterpipe from a material genealogy of the opium smoking. Indeed, too
many clues bring it closer to the bamboo pipe with a terracotta bowl
previously described. In 1617-1619, an English traveler described the
panoply of the Indian tobacco smoker in these terms:

"They have small earthen pots, of the shape of our flower pots, with a
narrow neck and a round opening, the belly of which is pierced with a small
spout, through which they fill the pot with water; then they put tobacco on
top, and a hot coal on top. Having first fixed in this beak a small straight
and hollow torch, half a fathom or an ell long, they suck up through their
mouths the smoke which first falls on the surface of the water and
tarnishes it."

74. It is also in a water pipe, traces of which can be found in the

vocabulary of the country from the middle of the 17th century, that
smokers in northern Vietnam consume their tobacco:

"The cay god: the most popular and the most widespread, the 'water pipe
of the ploughmen' that they take to the fields, is 'made of a bamboo of 30
to 40 centimeters, of which an egg forms the waterproof bottom and holds
back a sheet of water. A third of the way up is a small stove containing a
pinch of tobacco. A long and single aspiration of the smoker passes the
smoke over the layer of water in such a way that he receives it cool' (...)."

75. It will be noted that the dimensions of the bamboo stem are similar to
those of the stem of the opium pipe, and that the bowl is positioned on the
same length of the suction tube. By the materials used for their
manufacture and by their ergonomics -at least in the case of the
Vietnamese pipe- these models are much more similar to the classic opium
pipe than the latter is closer to the Chinese copper tobacco pipe.
Consequently, nothing prevents us from thinking that the tobacco-opium
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mixture could have been initially carried out in a water pipe, either in
India -marginally, given the absence of references on this practice- or in
Java, an island in which the impregnation of the tobacco leaf in a solution
of opium is described at a time when the water pipe was used in the
Chinese community, either still in Formosa or in mainland China. The rest
of the innovation process can be extrapolated in these terms: removal of
the water reservoir from the pipe, adaptation of the stove to the
consumption of a mixture in which the opium gradually ceases to be an
adjuvant for consumption in a pure state (that is to say a progressive
reduction in the diameter of the chimney of the furnace) and introduction
of the ad hoc accessories of the opium smoking (supra). Everything
suggests that this development took on a decisive character in the
southern provinces of China and that the city of Canton must have played
a significant role in this process. In fact, the technical improvement of
smoking instruments was certainly carried out in parallel with successive
experiments in the adulteration of raw opium, conducted with a view to
improving the substance intended to be smoked. From this perspective, it
is probably no coincidence that the invention of the opium pipe bowl is
precisely localized by common discourse in a place which has left its name
to the most elaborate of the preparations of opium for smoking (supra).

76. Can we deduce from the above a chronological framework relating to

the experimental phase of the opium smoking? Once again, it is up to
sinologists to provide all the details relating to this process. It seems to me
nevertheless possible to propose some approximate temporal milestones. It
is known that the tobacco-opium mixture, in a rudimentary form, was
practiced from the second half of the 17th century in Southeast Asia.
Loading a pipe with a mixture of this type or of a significantly different type
-like the madak- was therefore an open possibility. For Doctor Gaide, this
new smoking method must be located in the first years of the 18th
century:

"Given that the ancient travelers (...) make no mention of opium dens, and
that the Chinese authors themselves do not seem to have known this
mode of employing the drug before the XVIIIth century, we are in right to
affirm that the use of the pipe, in its present form, could hardly have been
established as a result of the habit of tobacco mixed with opium, which was
then a current practice. So that the origin of smoking in China would be
contemporary with the beginning of the 18th century."

77. I will simply nuance the statement of this author, by calculating that at
that time, the opium pipe was certainly not to be presented in "its current
form", but on the contrary in a more rudimentary construction, even in
the simple form a water or tobacco pipe. It was only gradually, during the
18th century, that a series of improvements, affecting both the
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instruments and the substance of the opium smoking, led to the
development of the panoply and the process characteristic of the classical
Thebaic method. Without being able to date exactly the term of this
evolution, the testimony of Father Huc makes it possible to establish that
this method was definitively instituted in the first half of the 19th century.
The description he gives us of his Chinese Empire corresponds, term for
term, to smoking as it was practiced in the Far East at the end of the 19th
century or in France during the Belle Époque:

"Opium is not smoked in the same way as tobacco. The pipe is composed of
a tube about the length and thickness of an ordinary flute. A little before
the end of this tube, one adapts a ball of terracotta, or of another more or
less precious material, and which one pierces with a small hole which
communicates with the interior of the tube. Opium is a blackish and
viscous paste which one is obliged to prepare in the following manner
before smoking. Take with the end of a long needle a portion of opium the
size of a pea, then heat it in a small lamp until it swells and has reached
cooking and consistency wanted. Then place this opium thus prepared
above the hole of the ball, so as to give it the shape of a small cone which
we take care to pierce with the needle, so that there is communication
with the tube cavity. Then approach this opium to the flame of the lamp.
After three or four aspirations, the little cone is entirely burned, and all the
smoke has passed into the mouth of the smoker, who imperceptibly rejects
it through the nostrils. The same operation is then repeated, which makes
this way of smoking long and meticulous. The Chinese prepare and smoke
opium always lying down, sometimes on one side and sometimes on the
other; they claim that this position is the most favorable."

78. These observations go back to a voyage of 1847. Need it be specified

that they do not indicate the date on which the method appeared; but
more prosaically that the opium smoking, in this form, was sufficiently
diffused at this time in China to be visible to a foreign traveller. On the
basis of this last remark, as well as the preceding reflections, it is
reasonable to consider that the definitive structuring of the classical
Thebaic method is posterior by about a century -or at least several
decades- to the estimate put forward by Doctor Gaide to date the origin of
opium smoking in China.

Conclusion

79. From a diachronic point of view, the history of the opium poppy and
the substances derived from it provides an example, if not unique at least
atypical, of products whose dissemination is based on an astonishing
collaboration between civilizations. The plant, which does not grow in the
wild, was probably domesticated in Europe from prehistoric times. It
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penetrates late in the Far East through the intermediary of Arab
merchants, without however the technique of extracting the juice from the
capsule of the poppy being mastered by the natives. First imported from
Arabia and later produced in India on a large scale, raw opium spread to
Southeast Asian markets before the arrival of Europeans in the region.
From this time onwards, they not only gave a new extension to this trade,
but contributed decisively to modifying the way in which the substance was
consumed, by introducing tobacco from the Americas into Asia. The coasts
of the China Sea and the Java Sea were then the crucible of a fusion
between raw opium of Indian origin, tobacco of American origin and
indigenous smoking techniques also developed on the basis of influences
exterior. If it is not excluded that the tobacco-opium mixture could have
been experimented in India itself, it is only in South-East Asia that it
historically arouses the development of a specific mode of smoking which
leads on the invention of the classical Thebaic model. Its massive
expansion in 19th century China, as well as in the Chinese diaspora in
Southeast Asia, favored its penetration into the West, in the wake of
Chinese emigration to Anglo-Saxon countries and in the extension of the
colonization of Indochina in the French case. A few decades later, another
derivative of the opium poppy will synchronously follow such a path.
Isolated in the last decade of the 19th century by a German chemist,
heroin was massively produced in the second 20th century in Southeast
Asia and soon overwhelmed the narcotics market in Europe and North
America.

80. Unduly assimilated to a traditional practice of Asian societies by some of

its Western thurifers, the opium smoking is much more akin to a recent
creation, a hybrid work, which does not owe much to the centuries-old
customs of China and the Far East, but much to the cultural, technological
and economic changes introduced by Europeans in this part of the world.

CERIA, Free readings, August 2000

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