Harpers Weekly - Opium Smoking In China

September 4, 1880

Engraving and accompanying text from a 19th Century newsprint.

Purchased by the Museum of Drugs Paraphernalia and Related Antiquities April 2008

The above image from Harpers Weekly offers an intriguing insight into Western attitudes during the later half of the 19th Century. Intertwined with the issue of substance use was the constant theme of race. Here we see a Sikh gentleman being invited into the heart of the opium den. The attendant Chinese waiter has a cold, expressionless face, with set jaws and cruel eyes. He holds a candle up to the scene of abandonment before him, as the Sikh gentleman moves forwards to take his place amongst the other opium smokers, already lost in the haze of their narcotic stupor.

What stands out from the picture is the unavoidable fact that all the consumers within the opium den are all from non-white ethnic backgrounds. We witness a black man, still drawing on the pipe, his eyes bulging white with the effort through the gloom. In the foreground a man of Turkish/ North African descent has already given himself up to the effects of the drug, his hand hovering claw-like in the air above his jumbled bed. It is difficult to ascertain the ethnic background of the other two smokers, the one, lying on his back, the protrusion of his beard visible to the reader, the other lying on his side, face turned away into the darkness. All the while the Chinese attendant stands coldly by, a Sax Rohmer vision of calculating criminality, luring society to its reckless demise.

The message greeting the casual English observer of this unlikely vision in the late 19th Century must surely have that been that drug use was the exclusive vice of foreigners and one that should be treated with fear and caution if one were to retain the decent values essential to 'Englishness'. The inherent racism of this engraving is not an isolated occurence, rather the overiding view of drugs and the threat that both their use, and the associated mixing of cultures posed to decent white English society.