Now if ever I ran afoul of the law, I could blame it on the priest. But, as I said, there were a couple of problems. Now that this law-abiding diabetic was right with God, he faced the second of those problems.
It was almost impossible to get opium these days anywhere in America or Europe. For two years, with the help of many, even those not unfamiliar with the less savory strata of society, I searched. New York, nothing.
Paris, nothing. London, nothing. Rome, nothing. Berlin, nothing. Finally, from a Turkish art dealer, I got hold of something that was supposed to be opium.
It looked and felt like all the other stuff that was bought and sold as opium years ago when it was not so rare. Besides, even if it was, even if it ever had been, no one had a real opium pipe, no one knew how to use one. America had been involved in the opium trade since the early 19th century, when John Jacob Astor, among others, made a fortune smuggling tons of Turkish opium to Canton.
And as laudanum, opium was no less familiar in the States than it was in England. But it was the Chinese immigrants, come to build the railroads and work the mines, who brought the paradise of the pipe to America.
For 30 years and more, as the Chinese population spread across America, an ever increasing number of opium dens, amid ever increasing anti-opium legislation, operated in open secrecy in every major city. Amid raids, seizures, and arrests, opium dens continued to operate in New York and elsewhere. In the early decades of the 20th century, as the drug trade was taken over by the Judeo-Christian coalition that came to control crime, Jewish and Italian names became almost as common as Chinese names in the reports of those arrested for smuggling, selling, and den-running.
While the old Chinese opium smokers died off, the new drug lords actively cultivated a market for the opium derivatives, first morphine and then heroin, two 19th-century inventions that offered far greater profit margins—the Onion Principium—than opium itself. These drugs offered oblivion, not ethereality, a rush into the void rather than a slow drifting to blissful serenity. Younger people—strangers more and more to opium smoking as its presence ebbed, or knowing it only in the increasingly impure form in which the Judeo-Christian consortium delivered it forth; strangers more and more perhaps to the possibility of serenity itself, or to the appeal of any slow drifting—were easily won over to oblivion and the visceral rush.
They did not want a drawn-out ceremony, a ritual; they wanted the rush. While the cultivation and supply of opium increased beyond knowing, the smoking of opium vanished. Its end was an ouroboros: a decrease in demand, with no cause to rekindle or sustain that fading demand, as those who were the satisfiers of demand could make far more money by processing opium into heroin.
The flower of joy, crushed into the flower of misery, could yield fold in gold, fold in addiction, and thus, exponentially, on and on. By the late s, opium dens were rare. The bust, in the fall of , of a den in St. Paul, Minnesota, seemed a beguiling anachronism. The last known opium den in New York was a second-floor tenement apartment at Broome Street, between Forsyth and Eldridge Streets, at the northeastern edge of Chinatown.
There were a few old pipes and lamps, 10 ounces of opium. And 40 ounces of heroin. The date was June 28, That was it. The end of the final relic of a bygone day. I was assured by friends and contacts around the world that the same ouroboros had wound through every continent.
Even in Asia, I was told, the opium dens had vanished within the last 20 years. It was the same story, even in the most corrupt and lawless of lands: the old smokers had died off, the kids wanted the rush, the drug lords wanted to keep it that way. Old and young who had lived their lives in these places, old and young who had looked upon and skulked through this world as had Sir Richard Burton.
Sinners and saints, lawmen and criminals, drug addicts and scholars, lunatics and seekers. I remember Hong Kong. I was here long ago. I did not then know from vinegar, other than the kind you mixed with oil; let alone did I know from opium. Hong Kong then was a city where you could get whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted it. There was no night, no day: only the light of the sun and the light of neon, and the lush darkness, the endless rushing midnight, the true soul of the place, that imbued even the blazing dawn, where sun and neon became for one still instant the electric haze that was the single heartbeat of rest—taken upright at a bar or a gambling table, or abed in luxuriance of silk and faintly perfumed breath—that preceded the waking fiery breath of a dragon and a city that were one.
The fierceness of that freedom was the fire in the breath and the neon in the blood of the dragon. Now the fire is but smoke and ember, the neon anemic, the dragon feeble and more of shadow than of substance. Communism is a cement mixer that spews forth drab and indistinguishable gray concrete.
Wherever Communism comes, everything—the physical architecture of the place, then its soul—turns drab and gray, and in its weakness crumbles to a drabness and a grayness uglier and grimmer by far.
Leaving my hotel, I walk out into the night, across Salisbury Road, to the wide neon boulevard of Nathan Road, whose countless winding side streets and intertwining alleys were the places where all could be had for a price, be it sex or murder, a drink of rarest snake blood or a shot of purest dope, gambling or guns, gold or embroidery or jade, amulets to ward off demons or to court their favor.
The Chinese food here is still the best in the world. My friend, a gentleman more advanced in years and in dignity than myself, is a man of respect who has lived in Hong Kong all his life and knows its labyrinthine streets and alleys like the veins on the back of his hand.
In some cases, as in the above instance, I have disposed of names entirely. Handfuls of scurrying shrimp, their tiny eyes bright and their soft shells lovely with the delicate translucent blue of life, are scooped from a seawater tank, presented to us on a platter kicking and scrambling, their leaping escape to the carpet prevented only by the expert maneuvers of the waiter, who then dispatches them rapidly into a black cast-iron wok sizzling over high fire at tableside, douses them with strong fermented-rice liquor—to make them drunk in their dying, and thus supple of flesh—sets the liquor aflame, and even more expertly maneuvers their containment during the intensified frenzy of their fast death by fire.
Succulence and death. Cabbage, pig tripe, and white radish. Cobra soup—the more venomous the serpent, the more potent the tonic; gelatinous and steaming and delicious beyond description—garnished with petals of snow-white chrysanthemum.
Later, amid the crowded stalls of the night market, we watch as an elderly Chinese man hands over a small fortune in cash to another elderly man, a snake seller much esteemed for the rarity and richness of poison of his stock. The snake man pockets the money, narrows his eyes, and with a studied suddenness withdraws a long, writhing serpent from a cage of bamboo.
Laying down the blade, the snake man reaches his blood-drenched hand with medical exactitude into the open serpent, withdraws its still-living bladder, drops it into the eager hands of his customer, who, with gore dripping from between his fingers onto his shirt, raises the pulsing bloody organ to his open mouth, gulps it down, and wipes and licks away the blood that runs down his chin.
Top dollar. This—what we have witnessed here in the Hong Kong night—is true connoisseurship, pure of any note of bell pepper lurking in the cassis.
It is the same, true connoisseurship that surrounds the secret brewing techniques of the best snake soups, the pickling techniques and proper extraction, morseling, and savoring of delicacies such as pig-face. Surely, I figure, if this sort of rare and fine connoisseurship lingers furtively on, there must yet exist somewhere amid the labyrinths of this vast city at least one last sanctum of that greatest of connoisseurships.
Hua-yan jian, they were called: flower-smoke rooms. The flowers were courtesans; the smoke was opium. The flower-smoke room: the celestial perfumed salon of timeless serenity where one could suck on paradise while being paradisiacally sucked. The flower-smoke rooms, which thrived in Shanghai and Hong Kong from the 19th century until the early s, were of all sorts, from lowly brothels to chambered quarters of sybaritic splendor.
The vast majority of them, I have been assured, were of the former sort. My friend told me that the last and lowliest of the hua-yan jian had shut down many years ago. As for even the most low-down, humblest, and flowerless hole-in-the-wall remnant of an opium den, there was not one left in all of Hong Kong. Now, under Chinese rule, it would be almost impossible to find opium, let alone a place where it could be properly smoked.
Even in the new Shanghai, where child prostitution has burgeoned amid the tourist attractions, not a flower-smoke room is to be found. My friend was not alone in telling me this. An acquaintance close to sources in local law enforcement, after inquiries among those sources, conducted secretly on my behalf and with fine wile, was told that, while drugs were still common, the presence of opium in Hong Kong was practically nil. There was still opium to be found in the boomtowns of neighboring Guangdong Province.
There, in Guangzhou, the sale of opium is punishable by death. There, in Shenzhen, a few days before I was in Hong Kong, 11 drug dealers, including a teenage girl, were taken directly from trial to execution. I stand awhile toward midnight under the big whorish neon lips outside the Red Lips Bar on Peking Road. It is like standing in church light, filtered softly through dark stained glass: a comforting, a respite, a connection with old ways, old values, and sleaze gone by. He was born in Guangdong Province in , and he died in Hong Kong in , a few months before the return to Chinese rule.
Half a century ago and more, licenses to smoke opium were issued to certain inveterate smokers of means and standing. I buy them because he is said to have been the last of the licensed opium smokers.
With his death, at the age of 81, on April 21, , the legal smoking of opium, long unique unto him, came to its end. I turn to yet another native acquaintance, a gentleman of a different sort, with whom I am able to penetrate the inner circles of the triads of the Sham Shui Po district, an area so dark that its reputation as a black market serves as a veneer of relative respectability.
There are several meetings with different men, different groups of men. In the end, there is nothing that the night stalkers and gangs of Sham Shui Po cannot get for me. Perhaps a kilo of pure No. A ton of pure No. A truckload of pills? Artillery or explosives? American hundred-dollar bills complete with watermark, safety thread, and intaglio as fine as that of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing?
No problem. I lean inside the hotel elevator. I walk into a joint on Patpong Road in Bangkok, sit down on a banquette near the bar, and within a minute there is one naked scrawny girl to my left, another to my right, a third crouched between my legs beneath the little table set before me. The brace that flanks me have squirmed and curled their way under my arms, drawn each of my hands to a breast; the one under the table strokes my crotch and thighs with her fingers and head.
On the raised stage in the center of the room, five more girls perform simultaneously, one at each corner, one in the middle: two squat to lift Coke bottles with their pudenda, two undulate with spread legs against stage poles, one lies with a leg raised high, masturbating and wagging her tongue. With one hand, I squeeze a nearby nipple between thumb and forefinger. She whose nipple it is responds instantaneously with a swooning moan so overdone that when I laugh she just as instantaneously bursts into laughter herself.
The three of them will continue to work me either until I agree to take one or two or all of them upstairs, or anywhere I please— baht, the equivalent of about four American dollars, to the house; another few hundred baht per girl, negotiated separately with them, for the night—or until I slap them away in anger like flies.
This is why most Westerners come to Bangkok. Most of the girls are Isaan, he tells me, from the northeast of Thailand, where an insectivorous cuisine is common.
We sit in the warm night air of a small cloistered square—more of a courtyard—in the heart of Nana, near where his girlfriend lives and works. The girls here are much more sedate, cooler, less rabid than those of Patpong Road. The passage from the courtyard leads to the main drag of Sukhumvit Soi 4, where, amid much smoke of oil and grill, street vendors cater to the taste of the girls: fried grasshoppers, fried grubs of different size and kind, fried beetles, served forth hot from bubbling oil in parcels of white greasy paper; roast-blackened baby sparrows, roast-blackened chicken feet, straight from the grill on skewers of splinter wood.
My buddy has brought us a package of fried grasshoppers to share at the outdoor bar where we sit. The girls pay 10 baht, the equivalent of about 25 cents, for these scavenged or foraged delectables; everybody else pays twice that.
He shakes his head. Girls pass, approach the shrine, sweep back their hair with both hands in ritual obeisance. Under the third precept of Buddhism, which demands abstinence from all sexual misconduct, 20 groups of women are listed as forbidden. Whores are not included among them. Again, flowers without smoke. My expatriate friend has been living in Bangkok for many years, and he tells me that he has never heard of the existence of an opium den.
And yet Bangkok, with its vast Chinatown, is said to have boasted the biggest opium den in the world, an immense establishment on New Road, the oldest paved street in Bangkok. This biggest of opium dens is said to have been able to accommodate 8, smokers at once, and to have maintained a stock of 10, pipes. It is said to have operated into the early s. Bored with the tourist joints of Patpong Road and Nana, I have asked another friend, a Bangkok native whose good name I shall leave unsullied, to take me where the Thai guys go.
We drive across town to what he says is the best eating place in Bangkok. It is a nameless operation in a nameless alley near Songsawad Road in Chinatown. It does not exist by day, when the alley is crowded with trucks and the dense traffic of human haulers.
It exists for only three hours, between six and nine at night, when a few old, unsteady folding tables and folding chairs are set out in the alley near the foodstuffs, fires, pots, and pans of two suddenly materialized cooking stalls.
At the stroke of six, BMWs and chauffeured Mercedes-Benzes pull up at the corner of the alley; in minutes, all the chairs are taken. There are no menus. Some nights there are napkins, some nights not. Tonight is a lucky night. There are five tones in spoken Thai, each lending different meaning to a similar sound.
I have no idea what is being said between my friend and the stall tenders, but some minutes later there arrive bowls of steaming fish-ball and noodle soup. And yet its taste is as nothing compared with the taste of the soup in this nameless dark alley.
Its price is 60 baht, the equivalent of a dollar and change. While Thailand has all but eradicated the opium poppy in its effort to ingratiate itself with the Western powers, the country is still a central transport area for the heroin refined from the opium of the poppy fields of other, nearby regions. More and more, however, the transport caravans of the drug lords are hauling truckloads of amphetamine as well as of heroin. As my friend saw and convincingly expressed it, the relatively recent and fast-growing spread of cheap and plentiful ya ba is a plague that will ultimately prove far more destructive than heroin to the foundations of Asian society, just as speed itself is, in the long run, far more physically destructive and deadly a drug than heroin.
I could go to the drug bazaars of the slums of Klong Toey, west of Bangkok. There I could buy all the marijuana, all the crack, all the heroin, all the speed that any man could ever crave. But I would find no opium. In the morning, I meet with an older friend of my friend. He remembers the opium-den days of Bangkok, and he knows Chinatown well.
At the second landing, he exchanges words with a group of ominous-looking men gathered round a circular table. One of them nods, and we proceed through a curtain into a narrow hall that becomes a maze of narrow halls, lined with small rooms.
An old woman takes us to one of the rooms, brings us two small, dirty teacups and a pot of hot tea. A teenage girl enters, then another. These girls bear numbers, pinned to their open shirts. One is No. The other, astoundingly, is No. How many girls does this maze hold? I like No. She pours tea into the dirty cups, begins stroking my crotch.
She looks fresh, new to this place and still full of life. She speaks a little English, and while my companion lies back to enjoy his tea, I employ the only Thai that I have almost learned to properly intone: fin, which, in the second of its five tones, means opium. She mistakes my meaning as a desire for heroin.
She seems shocked, makes gestures of jabbing a spike into her slender forearm. No good. She seems no longer shocked but, rather, nonplussed, regarding me with a bemused smile as if I were a most odd man, misplaced in time. On the way out, my companion speaks again with men round the table.
Yes, this place, with its maze of rooms, had once been an opium den. But that was long ago. After days and nights in Chinatown, days and nights of wandering and searching pleasure palaces and hellholes of Bangkok, I begin to see that the true presiding god of this place is Colonel Sanders.
Images of the Colonel are everywhere; franchises abound, many of their entrances graced with life-size white plaster statues of the Giver of Fowl.
More than Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises in Thailand, not a single opium den. Somebody tells me that I should not leave Bangkok without trying the really special coffee at this really cool new place called Starbucks. By land, by water, by plane.
Across this river, through that jungle, each town dustier than the last. Phnom Penh. At one corner of the plaza is a very big barroom, made all the bigger by the absence of a wall and part of the roof, which appear to have been lost to an explosion some years ago, thus opening the place to the limitless black Cambodian night.
Outside, a bit beyond where the missing wall used to be, is a gigantic screen on which is projected a Malaysian monster movie with Cambodian subtitles, and the soundtrack screams that accompany every drive-in-size out-of-focus bloodletting occasionally drown out the screams of the place.
In an area near the front of the bar, a large and formidable Cambodian woman, perhaps in her late 50s, stalks amid a gaggle of young girls, toward whom she directs not infrequent screams of her own. When our eyes meet, her face of stone turns to a vicious smile that flashes gold teeth, and she draws near. All Phnom Penh. I have. You say me what want. She nods sternly, arrogantly, happily. What you want, I have. You say me what kind. I have all. Have year-old.
Have year-old, have year-old. What you want? Like new. Twelve year. Not even bleed. She is very skeletal. Her shoulder blades are sharp. I hook up with a guy who knows his way around. He hooks me up with a Cambodian guy who really knows his way around and who will do anything for money. Through the swarm of beggars outside the club, the Cambodian guy leads me about a mile or so along Sisowath Quay, then down a dark backstreet, to a scrap-patched bamboo shack.
There is a group of shirtless, scrawny Cambodian men. There is a long, involved discussion, with no small amount of obvious debate among the group of shirtless, scrawny men. My companion explains to me that the legacy of the Khmer Rouge is that Cambodian no longer trusts Cambodian. In the end, there is assent among the men. They will sell me opium pellets for eating. I want to smoke opium. I want to smoke opium in an opium den.
There is no opium den, they say. They do not even have a pipe. They know of no one who has a pipe. We leave. My companion assures me that out in the wild swamp country where the Tonle Sap and the Bassac and the Mekong are one, there are men who still smoke opium. One of them is a friend of his. This friend is beyond the reach of any telephone. All we can do is go to the swamp country and hope that we will find him.
The journey cannot be made by car. We hire a two-passenger moto whose driver knows the twisted trails of the outback, and we ride off into the night. In the middle of nowhere, my companion tells the driver to stop. My companion walks away, vanishing into the blackness, and a few minutes later returns. He tells me that he will lead me to his friend, then return to town. His friend will drive me back later. At the top of a bamboo ladder, the friend stands smiling.
My companion says some words to him, and the friend welcomes me naturally and warmly as my companion leaves us. The friend is younger than I, and he seems to be a very happy man. He is lean, sinewy, and moves with slow grace. The walls of the hut are made of bamboo and woven strips of frond, its floor of slats.
There is light from a small oil lamp, and from candles. His eyes are glassy. That he knows I cannot understand him does not keep him from speaking to me, ever smiling, occasionally nodding in delight as if I have enjoyed or agreed with this or that observation of his. Done with his ganja, he turns his attention to a chipped and cracked lacquer box, from which he takes a large soft black square that is wrapped in cellophane imprinted with little yellow pagodas.
He unwraps the opium, places it on a lacquer tray that holds two small, sharp knives, a pair of thin-bladed scissors, a box of matches, a spindle fashioned from a bicycle spoke, a short rectangular strip of stiff dry frond, and an unlighted coconut-oil lamp whose glass chimney has been crafted by expertly cutting the bottom from a jelly-jar glass.
Lifting a slat from the floor, he withdraws a cloth-wrapped opium pipe from a hidden compartment. The pipe is about 18 inches long, made of dark carved wood, with a damper saddle of brass and a bowl of stone. With one of the knives, he cuts off a piece of the opium, kneads and flattens it, and divides it into several equal parts. With the scissors, he trims the wick of the lamp. He strikes a match and lights the lamp, adjusting its homely chimney.
The sweet, subtle scent of the oil laces the air. With the point of the spindle he takes a tiny piece of opium, places it on the piece of dry frond, and, over the chimneyed flame of the lamp, turns and rolls the opium with the spindle point until it is transformed into a perfect minuscule cone the consistency of soft, almost melted caramel, and the rich, tawny color of hazelnut.
The opium bubbles, and the delicious perfume of the stuff, more beautiful than that of any garden, flowers unseeable and unknowable, mingles with color turned to scent, hue of tawny hazelnut to aroma of hazelnut roasting, foreshadowing more sublime synesthesia to come.
The morsel done, he scrapes out the toxic residue from the damper, prepares another morsel, sets it in the pipe, and passes the sucking end to me, instructing me gently with words I do not comprehend as he positions, adjusts, and holds the pipe for me over the sweet spot of the lamp.
My pattern of breath is wrong, and the bubbling opium extinguishes again and again. Finally, yes—he nods, there is the baptism of approval in his eyes—I have it: the vapors deep in my lungs, wisping full from the fastness of my mouth, the opium bubbling in luscious magic in the pipe bowl over the lamp.
Then it is gone. There follows another pipeful for me, then one for him; yet another for me, another for him. We smile to each other from our parallel mats, the pipe and tray of implements between us. I offer him an American cigarette, which he takes with delight. We lie back and smoke; and now, wordlessly, we understand each other perfectly in the eloquence of a silence that not only contains all that has ever been and all that ever will be said, but also drosses the vast babel of it, leaving only the ethereal purity of that wordless poetry that only the greatest of poets have glimpsed in epiphany.
Their epiphanies seem to be borne for me to read in the cigarette smoke that swirls above me. To learn to read what silent love hath writ, to bow to the power of the wind. This is to live. This is to know that what one can say or write is as nothing before that silence and that power. Through rifts in the thatched roof, I can see the stars in the black of night. There are the sounds of night birds, the lone distant howls of creatures. Feral dogs? No matter: those that fly and those that prowl, we are beneath the same stars, fleeting spirits born of and destined to the same almighty silence.
The oldest word in Western literature, the word with which the Iliad began: rage. To speak is to rage against that silence whose winds are the only true poets. I think of Homer beholding these same stars. To rage, to kneel in wisdom before wisdom that is beyond wisdom. What does it matter? I grind out my cigarette. Another pipe for me, another for him. Another for me, another for him.
I am not going to rhapsodize here about opium. But I will say this: it is the perfect drug. There is nothing else like it. Historically, opium dens have provided the derelict arena in which to play out a city's morality battles, immigration panics and approach to drug use.
In cities all over Europe and America in the 19th and early 20th centuries, opium dens were largely operated by Chinese immigrants. By the Chinese community made up nearly 7 per cent of the Victorian population, boosted by those coming to seek fortune in the state's goldfields. Opium was not illegal in Victoria until , and the volume imported into Australia increased fivefold in the late s to keep up with demand.
Opium dens may have been introduced to Melbourne by the Chinese, but photos from the time show they had a distinctly cross-cultural appeal. The drug's mystique is accentuated by the customary image of users lying down, their bohemian bobble-heads hovering above the dust mites.
This signature repose is more than just the default arrangement of limbs most conducive to experience oblivion; it's also the best position to hold the pipe over the lamp. Moreover, most users were ill-equipped to prepare the apparatus themselves, making communal gatherings the product of necessity. The fear of the Chinese influence was made plain in the Victorian Parliament Report on The Chinese Population in Victoria, in which the term "evil" appears 43 times.
As for the effects of opium, there is concern that "in the course of time the practice will gradually spread among the European population, and produce as disastrous results upon them as upon the Chinese people". In developing a remedy, "exceptional legislation must be provided for this exceptional people, to save them from ruining themselves and society around them". Ultimately, the fight for a city's soul can only be won on a particular straight and narrow path:.
The moral dimension of the outrage over opium dens was captured by the Total Abstinence Society; an organisation formed in Melbourne around and infamous for their New Year's Eve parties that finished at pm sharp.
Newspapers of the time did their part to support the anxieties of the temperance movement, some news reports were rich with alliterative slurs of the sort rarely seen outside of viral racist rants on public transport. Hearing stories of this nature, one magistrate condemned daughters who frequented the red light district as, "poor hardened wretches", and saw it as his duty to "prevent girls following such a filthy, dirty life". The cause was adopted by Cole's Funny Picture Book, the popular series packed with stories, poems, cartoons and Victoriana puzzles.
The 'family amuser' devoted some its pages to warning of the opium scourge and of drugs that "physically, mentally and morally injure or ruin the greatest number of mankind".
Some of the above 'pipes of the world' could be found at Melbourne's notorious district of debauchery, 'Little Lon', bounded by Lonsdale, Spring, La Trobe and what is now Exhibition street. Described in by evangelist Henry Varley as "a disgrace to any civilized city on earth", Melbourne's slums are today scarcely recognisable after being cleaned up in the s. The area has undergone multiple archaeological digs, with opium pipes uncovered alongside children's toys and crockery.
Many objects associated with opium smoking have been obtained by the Melbourne Museum, largely through sustained drug busts and police raids on opium dens. Our Curious Melburnian Lindsay says the building where he sometimes worked was near the corner of Swanston and Little Latrobe Streets, and he was certain an opium den existed in the building.
Research in also showed us how the demographic of Little Latrobe Street changed, from Anglo-Saxon in the s to largely Chinese in the early 20th century.
There is also plenty of evidence to suggest opium dens existed in Melbourne as late as the s. Newspapers from the time reported on a push by police to clean up the area and close down opium dens, many of which were in buildings on crown land. There were opium seizures at the ports too, as shown below with two customs officers displaying for the media their find, much like bureaucratic cats bringing to their owner a dead bird stuffed with contraband.
We could find no record of police raids at the building where Lindsay worked, so maybe this was one den that escaped the long arm of the law. The area once known as Little Lon, where opium dens flourished years ago — and even more recently, if we consider Lindsay's tale — is now a mix of business, residential and university buildings. The building where Lindsay worked was recently demolished, but you only have to take a short stroll down Little Latrobe Street to get a sense of what the area must have been like back when opium dens dotted the landscape.
Melbourne's Chinatown is the longest continuous Chinese settlement in the western world and a now source of great pride.
The community's contribution to Melbourne's identity and culture is today celebrated by the population at large, just not with opium. Lindsay Coker wanted to know about the history of opium dens in Melbourne, and whether there was any record of one he remembered at a building where he worked in Topics: drugs-and-substance-abuse , history , community-and-society , melbourne , vic.
First posted March 23, More stories from Victoria. By Nicole Mills. By Tim Callanan. By Daniel Burt. If you have inside knowledge of a topic in the news, contact the ABC. ABC teams share the story behind the story and insights into the making of digital, TV and radio content.
Read about our editorial guiding principles and the standards ABC journalists and content makers follow. Learn more. By Ahmed Yussuf. Her first fight was at age 13, facing an opponent over a decade her senior — an early indication that Caitlin Parker was to become no ordinary boxer.
Now, she's a chance of making boxing history.
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