Seattle opium den

Chinese migrants smoke opium at a boarding house in San Francisco in the late 19th century. An opium den in San Francisco circa , one of many such establishments that opened in the city's Chinatown. A rare photo showing a close-up of a user preparing a 'pill' of opium for the pipe. An adolescent smokes opium in San Francisco's Chinatown in the s, one of thousands of addicts in the USA at the time.

Opium smoking was brought to America by the rush of migrants during the California Gold Rush. These two men were pictured in San Francisco in Two women are tended to as they lie in beds in one of the more upmarket dens in New York in around His methods, it is stated, were unique.

Chinese merchants at Victoria imported the opium, and it was landed during the night at a point near Seattle. Stevens had two skeleton pianos, it is said, and two large iron safes into which the opium was packed. The receptacles were then shipped by freight to four fictitious names in Portland, where the distributors got possession of the opium. Even the dullest customs agent, one would think, would eventually have become suspicious about two large iron safes, not to mention a pair of unplayable "skeleton" pianos, being shipped back and forth repeatedly between Seattle and Portland].

For still more smuggling incidents and stories, please click here. McCurdy, Pacific Monthly p ]. Imagined opium "den" from an publication. Like many such visual and verbal images, it is partly racist in intention, depicting Chinese as being astoundingly and unbelievably depraved. Credit: Wikicommons. Tray with opium smoking equipment: 2 pipes, a lamp, tools for handling the opium, a pipe bowl rack, and various opium containers. Credit: Steven Martin.

Opium Use. Pieces of opium cans and sherds of opium pipe bowls are found during just about every excavation of early Chinese sites in the U. Wegars has given us permission to include photographs of some of those items on this webpage.

In the meantime, this drawing, from Louis J. Beck's New York's Chinatown , as reproduced on a website of the University of Victoria, may help readers in identifying the various kinds of opium equipment. Note that some of: Beck's terms are not understandable to modern Cantonese speakers.

English Beck's Mandarin Characters. Incidentally, readers should be cautious about buying old opium pipes from antique shops or on the Internet. The great majority of such pipes were destroyed long ago by opium sellers and addicts seeking the "yen pox," the tarry residue, inside. Such residues, though unpleasant-tasting, still contained enough opiate alkaloids to satisfy users' craving for the drug.

Hence, almost all "opium pipes" currently on the market are either recent reproductions or for tobacco rather than opium. The lack of erotic behavior or other intense interaction is realistic. As Emily Wharton says in her testimony: "the desire to get your pipe ready is far too earnest a business to allow of any desire for idle talk,". A public-spirited narcotics cartel? Chinese sources for opium market prices in the U. Opium equipment in the U.

How much opium did white Americans use? The "Smoking Opium Exclusion Act" of What did it actually prohibit? Opium and Anti-Chinese Propaganda. The growing of poppies and the production of raw opium does not concern us here. It is enough to say that the old Anglo-Indian monopoly had been broken by the late 19th century but that opium from Patna and Malwa in eastern and western India, produced under the tight control of the colonial British government, was still greatly preferred by the world's opium smokers.

The Indian products, especially the Patna kind, fetched a considerably higher price than opium from other poppy-growing areas such as Egypt, Persia, Turkey, and China itself. Even more prestigious were Indian opiums refined in Hong Kong, where the water and master refiners were thought to be the best in the world. This refining process does concern us, because the end result, opium "boiled" or "cooked" and packaged by a small number of Hong Kong firms, had a central influence on the economies and lifestyles of many North American Chinese in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Opium refining was not confined to eastern Asia. Among the places where it was done on a large scale but reputedly with less concern for quality were Victoria, Vancouver, and New Westminster in British Columbia, ideally located for wholesaling or smuggling their products to the United States.

The province's close connections with Britain must have given it an advantage in getting raw opium from the world's most famous opium-growing areas, Patna and Malwa in British India. Whether all British Columbia opium really came from there is not so clear. The low price for which it sold might suggest otherwise. One of the first North American researchers to recognize the importance of brand consciousness in the North American opium trade was Priscilla Wegars of the Asian American Comparative Collection at the University of Idaho, at which the above can seals were photographed.

By assembling a large collection of excavated opium cans, each marked with impressed brand name seals, from archaeological sites in the western United States, she has been able to show that smokers continued to be loyal to Fook Lung and Lai Yuen, in spite of their higher price, for many decades, that cans of these high-prestige brands were often reused, and that a major lower-priced competitor was Victoria in Canada, where a number of companies refined opium and sold most it for smuggling into the United States.

The general subject of opium cans is discussed below. Cantonese Mandarin Characters. Lai Yuen 2. Fook Lung 3. Hop Lung 4. Wa Hing 5. Tai Soong Victoria. Refining and Testing Opium in China, Illustrated London News The names and stamped seals of Hong Kong opium producers were among the first internationally recognized brand names in the history of Asia.

From the s onward they were recognized in North America as well. Elizabeth Sinn J Chinese Overseas 1, 1:p , has studied the Hong Kong opium trade in strictly economic rather than moral or medical terms. These language and regional ties should have given Wo Hang a major advantage in selling opium to smokers in the U. The size of opium cans was standardized. The retailers, although regarded at the time as extraordinarily greedy, seem to have been satisfied with a smaller per-unit profit than any modern seller of alcohol in shops and bars.

Remains of such cans, generally well preserved, are common at archaeological sites where Chinese North Americans formerly lived, both in rural mining districts and in urban Chinatowns. Christopher Merritt of the University of Montana has recently Note 2 made a discovery that helps to explain why excavated opium cans tend to be in good condition: dented and twisted perhaps, but not rusted or decayed. Merritt analyzed 17 cans of this kind from four sites in Montana.

None of the cans were of iron protected by a layer of tin -- hence, they were not the kind of container that was called a "tin" in Britain and in those days, Canada or a "tin can" in America.

Instead, all of Merritt's cans were made of brass, an alloy of copper and zinc. The seams of the cans had been soldered with a lead-arsenic alloy such as was commonly used as soldering material in both China and the West.

Merritt suggests that the lead and arsenic might have had negative effects on the health of opium smokers. He is right in theory, and the copper could have had negative effects as well. However, cans of all kinds for instance, salmon cans and corned beef were regularly sealed with lead solder in those days, and those eating the contents of such cans were exposed to much greater quantities of poisonous metals than were opium smokers. On the positive side, the copper, zinc, and lead had antimicrobial and antifungal properties that must have helped to protect the opium inside the cans.

Their resistance to corrosion meant that opium cans could be, and often were, reused. Priscilla Wegars in conversation has suggested that this could mean retail fraud by sellers who repackaged cheap Victoria opium to pass it off as the more costly Hong Kong product. We do not doubt that in many cases she is correct. However, the re-use and resealing of old cans must also have had more innocent motives. As shown by the example on the far left of the above photograph, resealing sometimes left so many obvious signs of repair that such cans would not have fooled even the most naive of opium addicts.

Oct Note 2: Christopher W. Opium can from private. Entrance to opium shop in San Francisco? Harpers Weekly Fake Opium Brands in San. We have also registered in Hong Kong.

We have been patronized by customers locally and abroad and are famous among them. Lately we have heard that some shameless people are using Lai Yuen and Fook Lung marks on counterfeit opium, trying to take away our business and cheat the people of the four quarters. Now they dare to use our companies' names, falsely claiming that they belong to a San Francisco branch; their intention is to pass as pearls even though they are just fish eyes.

If we do not alert the public, customers might buy their products by mistake and suffer no slight losses. We are here to notify the public by having this announcement in the newspaper.

We hope you the honorable readers will know that our Fook Lung and Lai Yuen companies do not have other branches in other cities. The products that are shipped to San Francisco are handled solely by our agent, a Westerner, H.

You should find that his name appears on the tax stamp adhering to the opium can. Those who buy Fook Lung and Lai Yuen opium must identify the right stamp, trade mark, and the fragrance of the opium to avoid making mistakes. This is our profound wish.

Notice in Chungsai Yatpo , , Dec The following story appeared in The Coast magazine in It purports to be from the memoirs of a retired opium smuggler who formerly had carried the drug by boat from British Columbia to Washington State before making his great discovery. The editors do not doubt that every word of his tale is true. I knew what kind of bottom could be counted on at every practicable landing and whether the shore was shelving or sheer. I learned the location of the most secluded coves and where a smuggler could run in and lay low up a creek when a revenue cutter threw up her smoke too close.

That is a part of the education of the successful smuggler in those waters. I learned all the data well and profited by it. But one day I narrowly escaped being captured.

They gave me a hard run and against my better judgment I dropped overboard in deeper water than I judged to be altogether safe. But I found bottom and my breathing tube was long enough to rise above the water. I found myself walking on a sea bottom paved with cans of opium. At that particular point among the islands the revenue cutters have been accustomed to waylay the smuggler on their return from British Columbia, and there in their frantic haste to remove incriminating evidence, the hard pressed fugitives have been tossing overboard year after year whole boatloads of the expensive cans of poison.

This practice kept up for forty years had resulted in a tremendous deposit of canned opium. The sea floor was literally paved with the precious little cans. You see the point was so well watched that the smugglers dared not return to recover their wealth.

So they charged the loss up to bad luck and forgot the existence of the submarine deposit. The next question was the means of converting it into cash. It was a sort of crossroads of the marine tracks and at certain stages of the tide the only practicable route for south-bound boats. It was obvious that the utmost care must be taken in raising the treasure if my father's son was to profit by the enterprise. Having never been captured I was not personally known to the revenue officers, hence was able to put into effect a harmless little stratagem which worked perfectly.

I secured a large scow decked over and on this I built a handsome cabin making a quite luxurious house boat. I then enlisted the assistance of a trusty friend. We laid in a prodigal supply of expensive fishing tackle, bird guns, and camping paraphernalia, then rigging ourselves out in modish attire, we had our house boat towed to the scene of the opium cache and anchored close in shore.

Soon a revenue agent on watch in that locality came aboard and, after sampling our prime whisky and choice cigars, departed in the best of humor.

Nothing wrong about us. Oh, no. We were just a pair of debonair and jolly young fellows--rich young swells--house-boating for pleasure. Every night I spent hours under water and my partner steadily hauled up baskets full of opium cans which he stowed safely away beneath the deck of the scow. Three months of nightly labor exhausted the field, but by this time the scow was well laden. Towed into a lonely cove near the city of Seattle, the cargo was easily transferred to those obscure channels of trade where vice pays the bills and always seems to be well supplied with money.

Who would suspect a couple of wealthy young house-boating tourists of being implicated in the smuggling of opium? Certainly such a suspicion never crossed the minds of the sapient revenue officials. At one point we came upon a sloop which had been scuttled in about six fathoms of water. There was a heavy cargo of opium aboard, and what gave us an unpleasant shock, two drowned Chinese. Ugly stories are circulated among the islands as to the propensity of the smugglers to leave the helpless Chinese to drown when the revenue cutters press them close, but this was the only evidence we ever discovered of such tragedies.

Many a revenue agent sampled our good cigars and laughed at our jokes, and each succeeding summer they joyously welcomed us and our hospitable house boat to those remote and loggy wilds. As we had by this time a million dollars apiece in the Elliott Bay National bank, we sold the luxurious houseboat and returned to the paths of financial rectitude. While there was considerable profit in the business, I should never have made a competence but for a fortunate chance.

Thus my experience disproves the theory that industry and economy are certain to lead to success. But when the goddess Chance smiled upon me my fortune was made. I had a rubber breathing apparatus fitting over my head. A tube led up to the surface of the water and bobbing around among a lot of seaweed or rushes on a shallow bay it was hard to discover which was the rubber breathing tube and which the innocuous seaweed especially when you did not suspect the nature of the stratagem.

When a revenue cutter's smoke loomed up dangerously close to me, I'd drop the cans overboard, then with leaden weights on my feet I d plunge in also and calmly wait while the emissaries of the law confiscated my empty skiff and steamed away.

It was dead easy and reasonably profitable. Man is a curious animal: do you know there was just one privation connected with those enforced submarine trips that made me cross and unhappy? I couldn't smoke while waiting for the revenue officers to go away. You see, I was like those new coast defense cannon. I was built on the disappearing plan.

Shocked, Shocked! In , W. Mackenzie King, Deputy Minister of Labour and a future prime minister of Canada, traveled to Vancouver to study the opium business. He went partly in response to the fact that two of those making claims for reparations after Vancouver's anti-Asian riots of the previous year were opium "manufacturers" i.

An all-out ban on the importation of foreign opium followed in Again, it had little effect. By , 5, chests were imported. By , 16, By , 70, What was forced on China inevitably spread throughout the world. From the s on, the opium den spread across the world as a seedy place of refuge for commoner and lord. In Europe opium was viewed as a potentially liberating and creative touchstone.

In America, it was seen as an evil and degenerate drug that led to vice, squalor, poverty, madness and death. However, it should be noted that when the use of opium and the opium den was most prevalent or most virulent—depending on your view—that both America and Europe were at the peak of an industrial, social and cultural revolution.

Opium did not appear to make people slackers. Even a fictional hero like Sherlock Holmes indulged in the occasional pipe —all in the line of duty, of course. King was also lobbied by the Anti-Opium League, a Chinese activist group that took him on a tour of the Chinatown drug scene.

Directory listing for Market Alley in Note there are no longer any white women listed because the red light district was moved on. Back in Ottawa, King drafted legislation that banned opium for non-medicinal purposes. It came into force in July and resulted in the first drug bust at the end of September. Headline for the very first drug bust in Canada. Daily Province , 30 September Police had heard rumours of the place being one of the more notorious opium dens in Chinatown, but for months were unable to pinpoint its exact location.

Finally a pocket knife-wielding VPD sleuth figured out that the entrance to the den had been concealed with newspapers and cut it open. The owner, Chan Yuen, was sentenced to twelve months hard labour. This sign for 34 Market Alley is the only surviving indication that this was once a bustling commercial laneway. After the red light district was shut down on Dupont Street in , gambling became the popular illicit pastime in Market Alley and a major preoccupation of the police.

One gambling joint that opened in the mids was so busy that a restaurant opened on the premises to feed the gamblers. The Green Door restaurant in Market Alley, Photo by Al Harvey. It was called the Green Door and in the s and 70s it became a favourite haunt for counter-culture types attracted by the underground feel of the alley entrance, lack of advertising, minimal signage, and especially low prices and good food.

Other coloured door restaurants opened in Market Alley, but the Green Door is the best remembered. It lasted until the s. Business card for the Green Door restaurant from , with a map making it clear the entrance was in Market Alley. When it closed in the s, commercial activity besides street drug dealing had all but ceased in Market Alley. Image from BCHistoryCollectibles. A small cluster of black people lived there in the early 20 th century.

Beatty Lane was the alley between Beatty Street and Cambie. The Scurrys were pioneer Vancouverites, arriving here just before the city incorporated.

Hiram ran a barbershop on Carrall at Trounce Alley, which his sons continued after his death.