For most of the 19th century, and well into the 20th, the majority of Asia, and a good number of countries outside of Asia, were brought low by the scourge of opium! Even today, decorative, touristy opium-pipes can still be purchased in places like China, and Hong Kong, and antique opium paraphernalia can sell for hot bucks on the internet. But a casual look around online would suggest that a good number of people don’t have a solid grasp on what opium is, how it was used, or what was used with it. It’s been so romanticised and mythologised that in the 21st century, most people are largely clueless about this drug, which has had a presence in the human story for the past several hundred years.

In this posting, we’ll be looking at what opium is, where it comes from, what it was used for, how it was smoked, and what kinds of equipment were used in its recreational enjoyment. So lay back, relax, and breathe deeply, now…

What IS Opium?

Opium is an addictive, pain-killing drug, extracted from the bulbs of the poppy flower. Yes, the same poppy flower that gives you those black seeds you put on your bagels and bread-rolls. Slicing open the bulbs of the poppy causes the opium sap to seep out from the plant. Collected, concentrated and dried until it turns into a dark, cohesive, gunky mass, this is raw or ‘crude’ opium – opium which has not been refined, processed or otherwise altered in any way, apart from the natural processes required to extract and collect it.

Opium in this state is collected from the opium poppies, and when you have enough of it, it slowly dries out and turns into a dark-brown hard, sticky, gummy substance, which can be rolled and formed into blocks, pucks or “cakes”, as they used to call them, back in the old days. Opium in this state can be used for all kinds of things, such as mixing it into medicines for pain-relief, it can be refined into morphine or heroin, or it can be smoked.

Opium and China

Opium has had a long association with the Middle-and-Far-East, as well as being one of the main exports to Europe. Its main use was as a medicine, to relieve various types of bodily pains, from muscle-cramps to toothaches, fevers to gout inflammation. But opium in its raw form could also be smoked recreationally – a practice heavily associated with China in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Restrictions on the types of trade that China would permit with the West, largely the UK and the countries of Western Europe, led to them (again, mostly the British) importing large quantities of raw opium into China. The inability of European powers to pay for Chinese exports with silver (the only currency the Chinese government would accept) led to an enormous opium epidemic across the land as literal tons of opium were shipped in through ports like Canton, and later Shanghai and Tientsin.

The opium supply that the British relied on largely came from India and Burma, where it was harvested, processed, and then shipped through the Strait of Malacca to China where the addicted Chinese traded spices, porcelain, silks and other precious commodities for it.

Opium Equipment & Paraphernalia

As time passed, the Chinese started designing and manufacturing more and more elaborate opium-smoking equipment and paraphernalia, out of everything from bone, or brass, to ivory, from paktong, to solid silver. By the late 1800s, a full opium-smoking setup could be extensive, elaborately decorated, and made from some of the finest materials available.

A typical opium-smoking setup included a tray, at least one pipe, the associated pipe-bowls, a bowl-stand, a container to store the opium cakes, a spoon, a ‘needle’ or ‘staff’, and possibly just as important as the opium pipe and bowl – the opium lamp.

How to Smoke Opium?

So, you’ve got all this fancy stuff – pipes, trays, needles, spoons, opium caddies, cutesy little lamps…but how do you use all this stuff? You’ve seen it in TV shows, in movies, you’ve read about it in books, you’ve heard about it in stories from family-members (or at least, I did, when I was a child!), but how do you actually smoke opium? What’s the whole process behind this thing?

Smoking opium was a very involved process. It’s for this reason that all this paraphernalia and equipment was required. Smoking opium wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing like lighting a cigarette, or even filling up a pipe with tobacco. So how do you do it?

Step 1 – Preparing the Opium

Opium is the sap or latex which is extracted from the opium poppy, by slicing the bulb open, and collecting the liquid which seeps out from within. Once enough of the sap is collected, it’s dried in the open air. As the latex dries, it darkens and solidifies. This is raw opium. It’s compressed or molded into blocks or “cakes”, and then sold as-is.

To smoke this stuff, you first need to scrape off a small amount of opium using a pin, needle or “staff”. The amount removed isn’t very much – about the size of a pea. It’s rolled up into a little ball or “pill”, and then placed on a spoon.

Step 2 – Preparing the Opium Lamp

In many ways, the opium lamp is more important than the opium pipe. Without the lamp (or some other heat-source) you simply cannot smoke opium – so no lamp = no high!

You remove the wick-holder from the lamp and fill the reservoir with oil. Then you put the wick-holder (and the wick) back into the lamp and light it. Once the lamp-wick is burning properly, you put the glass lamp-chimney back over the base. The chimney of an opium lamp is low, squat, circular, and dome-shaped, with a small opening at the top.

The point of the lamp is to provide heat, rather than light, so you don’t need to expose a large amount of wick to the air. Instead, only 1-2mm of wick poking up above the wick-holder is really necessary.

Step 3 – “Cooking the Pill”

Once the lamp is lit and the chimney is replaced, you hold the spoon with the opium “pill” over the lamp-chimney. The heat from the flame warms the spoon, and the opium pill begins to melt and liquefy. Using the opium staff, you stir and stretch the mass as it melts, mixing it into a cohesive mass.

Step 4 – Filling the Pipe

After heating and ‘cooking’ the opium pill, it’s rolled back into a ball and then the cooled opium pill is poked into the bowl of the opium pipe. The natural stickiness of the opium will ensure it doesn’t fall out.

Step 5 – Chasing the Dragon

The fifth, and final step, is to actually “smoke” the opium.

In reality, you don’t “smoke” opium in the same way that you’d smoke tobacco, or marijuana or anything else like that, since there isn’t any actual ‘smoke’ involved. To ‘smoke’ a pipe of opium, you held the pipe over the chimney of the opium lamp, and oriented it so that the pipe-bowl is over the chimney-mouth. The heat from the lamp warms the pipe-bowl, which liquefies and boils off the opium sap. The vapour produced from this process is what you “smoke”. It’s inhaled down the pipe and into the smoker. You keep dragging on the pipe until the pill inside the bowl has been completely boiled away, and all the resultant opium vapour has been inhaled.

The Necessity of the Lamp

As you can see from this extensive, five-step process, smoking opium is no walk in the park! In fact, it was impossible to walk, or even move at all, while smoking opium. The need to liquefy and vapourise the opium mass within the pipe-bowl meant that a constant heat-source was required while smoking opium. And since you can’t “light” opium like you do with tobacco, it needed to be an indirect source of heat that was consistent and steady.

This is why in every depiction of opium smoking you’ve probably ever seen, opium smokers would lie down to smoke. It was easier to lay back on a bed or couch, and to recline on your side, holding the pipe outwards and over the lamp, with one hand holding the pipe by the mouth, and the other hand grasping the pipe by the end of the pipe-stem

The Lamp – A Physical Description

I bought the opium lamp featured in this posting from my local flea-market about a week ago, from a dealer in Asian antiques. It’s shape and overall style is very typical of the types of opium lamps used in the 1800s and early 1900s, until the crackdowns on opium began in the middle-and-later 20th century.

The lamp has an engraved and enameled body, made of brass, with hexagonal sides, and a flat base. There’s a decorative, circular, pierced brass grill around the top of the lamp, and a circular hole for the wick-holder. Seated on top is the etched glass lamp-chimney. Since the lamp is designed to provide heat, instead of light, there’s no way to mechanically adjust the wick – it’s simply held in place by a basic, tubular wick-holder. To make the flame larger or smaller, you have to push or twist the wick up or down inside the holder to adjust the height. Oil for the lamp is stored in the brass lamp-base, and as with all lamps, is drawn up through the wick via capillary action, before being burned at the tip which is exposed above the mouth of the wick-holder. Simple!