#opium dens

[fleshmess]

Opium dens

[thinkingimages]

opium dens

[pierrotsoup]

Once again interiors I am in love with . A nice mix of opium dens and wagons and breakfast nooks <3

[seventh-victim]

Young man with opium pipe reclining on a sofa covered with furs.   c.1904

caption reads: When bachelor dens cast over waking hours a loneliness so deep

[indizombie]

Let me dwell on the Chinese populations of Lahore and Calcutta. In our school days the Chinese population, which had originally come to the sub-continent at the height of the Opium Wars in China, worked either in leather tanneries, in restaurants or in laundries. If you read Rudyard Kipling’s story titled ‘The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows’, we see that in Lahore they ran opium dens inside the walled city. And though by the late 1960s their numbers had shrunk to a mere 36 persons, their Chinese food outlets started to become the rage. Initially they opened up shoe shops, but even these cobblers opted to open up restaurants. Today their food is the rage.

Majid Sheikh, 'Jews, Parsis, Chinese of Lahore and Calcutta', Dawn

[thinkingimages]

Opium. The word conjures up a louche exotic world of artists, writers, low-life criminals and nubile young women out looking for kicks. The word alone is intoxicating. It imbues a feeling of both fear and longing.

According to the dictionary, the word opium comes from Middle English, via Latin, via the Greek word opion, from diminutive of opos meaning sap or juice. Apparently, the word “opium” was first used in the 14th century.

Opium is cultivated from the papaver somniferum, a poppy which has white or purple flowers and a globe shaped capsule containing yellow seeds. This plant has been cultivated in India, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and China. Its principal active ingredient is the alkaloid morphine or C17 H19 N O3.

Opium gained its notoriety in the 19th-century with the advent of global trade and mass migration. Across Europe, upper-class writers and artists indulged their fancies by taking laudanum or eating opium leaves and pellets. The calming, soporific qualities of the drug were used in numerous medicines to treat babies, children, and adults. From teething problems to nervous disorders—opium was the medicine of the masses....

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[seventh-victim]

people inside an Opium den in Chinatown, New York, in 1925

[thinkingimages]

Opium Dens ~