The Last Opium Den (4 page)

I learn in Phnom Penh that there is but one opium boatman left of the many who once plied the turbulent Mekong. He is an old man, and after him, the river trade will end. Every month, he comes downriver, stopping at a few ports—Phnom Penh is one of them—where he sells opium to individual smokers and to those who deal in pellets for eating. In these same ports, he buys or barters for cheap clothing, which he brings back upriver to sell. His home port is unknown, but his monthly journey downriver is believed to begin near the heart of the Golden Triangle.

This phrase, which bears an air of Oriental ancientry, is really rather recent in origin, and gained currency, after the French Triangle d’Or, during the 1960s, when the war in Vietnam produced the biggest heroin boom in history, leading to the making of innumerable new fortunes from the region’s poppy fields. It is precisely defined by the three points where Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos near one another, at the confluence of the Mekong and Ruak Rivers: Sop Ruak in northern Thailand, the Shan-country headland southwest of Tachilek in Myanmar, and the western headland of Bokeo Province in Laos. The Golden Triangle, in its extended sense, encompasses more than 86,000 square miles of territory, the poppy-growing heart of Asia, and the heart, too, of the entwined violent serpents of tribal insurrections and the drug trade.

In Sop Ruak, the defining Thai point of the Golden Triangle, one encounters the House of Opium: a modest museum with historical displays, antique pipes, and rusted artifacts. This seems to confirm my worst fears, for when anything is deemed museum-worthy, then surely it is dead. Without walking too far, one may look across the Mekong to the lawless Shan lands of Myanmar. And what might that structure on the other side be? Nothing less than the construction site of the Golden Triangle Paradise Resort.

I sit in the breakfast room of the hotel in Chiang Mai, a hundred or so miles south. Another morning, another cup of coffee, another cigarette. Almost everybody I’ve met who has visited northern Thailand has encountered a tribal villager eager to administer a pipe or two of opium for cash. Invariably, those who have smoked it have gotten sick and little else from it. I have before me a business card of a trekking outfit. These are the people who take you to the villages of the tribes where you smoke the opium that makes you sick. I want to be back in the wild country outside Phnom Penh, lying in that hut amid the trees, looking at the stars through the shivering rifts in the thatch.

Another cup of coffee, another cigarette. I have never read a Graham Greene tale in my life, but suddenly I find I have entered a passage from one.

“Did they tell you in Bangkok that I was looking forward to meeting you?”

They? Who were they? I look up at a well-dressed, pleasant-seeming man whose English is so blithely enunciated that one never would think that it is to him the second of several languages.

“No,” I say.

He asks politely if he might join me for a moment. He speaks circuitously awhile, as propriety might behoove, leading me to the place where I, not he, openly state, as propriety does indeed behoove, the nature of my quest. He knows the politics of the drug trade well. I ask him if much has changed since the retirement a few years ago of the Shan leader Khun Sa, the infamous “prince of death,” who was believed to be the most powerful of the Golden Triangle’s drug lords.

“Not really, except perhaps for the loss of a colorful bit of local legendry.”

Odd, I say, as I had long believed him to be the true potentate of the heroin trade.

“Certainly most would have been led to believe so. But I think perhaps the true power lay elsewhere.” For a fleeting moment, I have the strange notion that he is speaking of himself.

He rises, tidies himself, smiles pleasantly. “Anyway, I have a friend who may be able to help you. I’ll give him a ring, and, if it’s convenient for you, I’ll meet you back here at 11.”

Then he is gone.

His friend accommodates us with an ashtray, perhaps as we have been gracious enough to remove our shoes without prompting before entering his Buddhist home. All I know of him is what the Graham Greene character has told me during our drive here to his home in the quiet countryside outside Chiang Mai: that he is a scholar and an opium master, fluent both in English and Chinese, and that he is a Buddhist, which means that I should remove my shoes at his threshold.

“Yeah,” he is saying, “I’ve seen the way those tribal guys prepare their opium. They boil it, run it through dirty socks, add a lot of dross, a lot of toxic pipe-head residue. I’ve seen them mix in these big yellow pills, morphine or whatever. To their way of thinking, it goes further that way. But they’re not smoking opium. They’re smoking shit. Most people in this world who think they’ve smoked opium have only smoked shit.”

Connoisseurs, he says, argue as to the source of the finest opium. Some say the best opium comes from Patna, India, along the southern bank of the Ganges. Others believe that the best opium is cultivated in the Lao sector of the Golden Triangle.

The processing of the opium into paste for smoking, however, is more important than the opium itself. Yen-gao, this smoking-paste is called in Chinese; chandoo, in India and Southeast Asia.

Besides contamination by the blending in of the toxic pipe-head scrapings, raw opium is subject to the addition of all sorts of noxious substances to increase its weight for sale, from gum arabic to molasses to tree mastics. The first step in the purification process is to submerge a loaf of raw opium, usually a brick of from one to two kilograms, overnight in a large pot of clear springwater. The next day, the pot should be brought to a full boil and whisked thoroughly for 15 minutes to completely dissolve the raw opium. As all of the many active opium alkaloids are fully water-soluble, this process separates the active opium essence from the inert vegetable matter. The pot is then removed from the heat and set to rest until the inert matter settles to a sediment. The contents of the pot are then filtered through a sieve lined with finely woven cotton or silk. The filtered sediment then undergoes a secondary boiling, whisking, and filtering. The two filtered liquids are then combined and filtered yet again, with whatever sediment collects being discarded. The liquid is then set aside in a large covered vessel for two days. Further filterings, further sedimentations follow. After 10 days or so, a final boiling, simmering, and reduction is completed. Further steps involve the addition of a cup of good brandy, to kill any spores that may have grown during sedimentation, and to help blend, balance, and enrich the active alkaloids. The brandy is added as the opium brew simmers, thus evaporating the alcohol and not degrading the smoking paste.

In the end a two-kilo loaf of raw opium yields perhaps one kilo of purest chandoo, which then may be consumed forthwith or set to age for years in porcelain or other ceramic jars sealed with cork and beeswax.

“Have 15-year-old. Have 13-year-old, have 12-year-old. What you want?”

Aged opium?

Yes, aged opium. There are reputed yet to be, in the dark, cool cloisters of the wealthiest connoisseurs, fine porcelain urns of opium, subtly and elegantly fermenting, now for 80 years and more, from the exclusive special stocks of the grandest of the old Shanghai salons.

Among those connoisseurs is one of the most celebrated fashion designers in Paris, reputed to possess the greatest collection of opium pipes in the world. (A collection of fine, vintage opium pipes would include imperial specimens of carved ivory and gold, white jade, and rare shagreen; pipes of 300 years’ age and more.) The designer is an importer of purest chandoo. What costs the equivalent of $500 in Laos—enough chandoo to last an addict for a year: 450 grams—costs twice that in Chiang Mai. By the time it reaches Paris, its price per gram is precisely that of gold on the day of its arrival.

While the purification of raw opium into chandoo lies at the heart of the opium master’s art, there are other matters attendant to his supervision of the smoking itself. The choice of oil; the amount of oil to be placed in the lamp well; the materials and construction of the lamp (yen-tene); the spindle, scraper, and more: these are all concerns to be reckoned with. Our host, who prefers oil of coconut because of its delicacy and faintness of scent as well as the temperature coefficient of the heat generated by its burning, tells of an old Chinese preference for rendered pig fat. Concerning the pipe itself—yen-tsiang, “the smoking gun”—our host is a traditionalist who abides by the simple perfection of seasoned bamboo, a saddle of silver, a bowl of kiln-dried red terra-cotta. Opium, if it is to be kept on hand for ready use, should be stored in a container of silver. These are, he assures me, but the rudiments of an ancient, arcane, and closed knowledge. He tells me of a volume, which he believes will soon be published, that promises to reveal this knowledge in full and in the context of the lore and true history of opium. (I have since glimpsed—and blurbed—this book, The Big Smoke: The Chinese Art & Craft of Opium, by Peter Lee, and I can say that it seems to be a work of astonishing breadth and depth, and by far the most valuable treatise on opium that we are likely ever to have. Published in Thailand by Lamplight Books, Ltd., as this piece was being prepared for press, The Big Smoke has not yet found an American or British publisher brave enough to take it on, and so, at least for now, the book remains highly elusive outside of Asia.

“Shall we have some, then?” our host asks.

We adjourn to a room of cushions and pillows and many books, and the equipment he has so knowingly described, from the terra-cotta-bowled pipe of aged bamboo to the lamp and spindle to the little silver canister full of purest chandoo.

The wick is trimmed, the lamp lit. Our host dips his bodkin into the canister, rolls and kneads the chandoo on the flat surface of the pipe’s bowl, held aslant above the heat of the lamp.

“The idea,” he says, “is to soften it, not burn it.” Slowly, as he works it, the dark chandoo turns a creamy golden brown. He centers the damper over the flame, to heat its tiny hole, then inserts the soft golden chandoo with the point of the bodkin so as to leave a pinhole at its center.

He extends the mouthpiece to me, tends to the position of the pipe and the steady coddling of the bubbling chandoo. The taste, the scent—yes, there is to them that lovely, sweet-roasting hazelnut aroma, that delicate perfume of unknown flowers; but these are just the airs that drift through what can only be called ambrosia. My lungs cannot have enough of it, so unimaginable the taste, so soft and gentle the vapors.

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

I am aswirl, bird-soul and breeze, amid the cool high mountain trees of the myriad-meaninged knowledge of that thing, savior and destroyer, within. Never has an afternoon passed in such serenity, in life lived so fully, so freely of the maggots of that glob of gross crenulated meat that we call mind. To be here now, wordless, every breath a bringing forth, peering calm and adrift through the interstices of forever.

Back in the other room, our host sits with a sketch pad on his knees, bowed over it, pencil in hand. He sits upright, tears the topmost sheet from the pad, and extends it to me.

“Here. This should help you find it.”

He then hands me a big vacuum-packed bag of tea. “The old man’s name is Chiang. Give him this from me.”

Somewhere in Indochina, in a crumbling city whose streets have no names, I walk out into the noonday heat and dust, unfold the hand-drawn street map, and gather my bearings. Nothing has ever seemed so simple: the fountain at one end of town, the temple at the other, and a road leading from the temple to a Honda shop, near where, on a backstreet, up the rickety stairs of a shack on stilts, I will find what I have sought.

Hours later, in the increasing heat and dust, I find myself still wandering, looking at the homely map again and again, clutching the bag of tea beneath my arm. While there are few other signs of commerce, there are at least three Honda shops, and every backstreet is crowded with nothing but old wooden shacks on stilts. Occasionally, when it seems to be the shack indicated on the map, as viewed from this perspective, then that, I call to a shack’s open door or paneless window: “Chiang ici?”

I wander on amid beggars and goats and dogs and chickens nesting in roadside garbage. This dying city is the dross of a former French colonial outpost now being reclaimed by the jungle and by dirt and dust where paved roads had been. But no one seems to understand my pidgin French, or to recognize the name of Chiang.

Night falls. After dinner at a Chinese restaurant, I meander to the fountain at the end of town. There are colored lanterns strung, signs of life, plastic tables and chairs, grim-looking girls serving coffee and drinks. In this city that shuts at midnight, all will soon be dark and silent here.

It is a city of many snakes. The night is diffused only by the dim soft glowings of the colored lantern lights. From the corner of my eye, I see a huge slithering creature moving nearby: a python of great and frightening girth. But its upraised eyes behold my own, and its eyes are human: a beggar with no limbs writhing sinuously among the tables on the dark cool earth. His human eyes turn cold, like those of a naga. Perhaps he is not a beggar at all. Perhaps he is merely of this place.

The next morning, on a street which does indeed have a name, I approach a clutch of loitering drivers amid their samlors and tuk-tuks on a corner where a big wooden building leans precipitously. I show them my map, with its landmarks. The men crowd round it gibbering, grabbing it back and forth. Sounds of recognition are followed by sounds of dismissal. After much debate among themselves and haphazard pointing in this direction and that, one of them snatches the map from another, folds it, returns it to me, climbs into his tuk-tuk, starts the motor, and, with no indication, waits for me to clamber aboard. The vehicle sputters around the corner, rattles several yards through patches of parched earth and mud, then comes to an idling halt before what, set back from the road a bit, is yet another shack on stilts.