Opium den
In urban areas of the United States, particularly on the West Coast, there were opium dens that mirrored the best to be found in China, with luxurious trappings and female attendants.
The jumping-off point for the gold fields was San Francisco, and the city's Chinatown became the site of numerous opium dens soon after the first Chinese arrived, around 1850.
Some immigrants have stated they smoked opium to provide a mental escape from the loneliness and prejudice they experienced from living in a foreign environment.
[1] However, from 1863 to the end of the century, anti-vice laws imposed by the new municipal code book banned visiting opium rooms in addition to prostitution.
Opium-eradication campaigns drove opium smoking underground, but it was still fairly common in San Francisco and other North American cities until around World War II.
[4] However, as dens began to open up in "respectable" neighborhoods, the city witnessed an increase in communal smoking and a growing tendency for more middle and upper class white Americans to partake in opium use.
[citation needed] An 1881 interview of police officer James Mahoney appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle affirms these developments.
He observed that a majority of white smokers had previously been "hoodlums and prostitutes," but with the rise of "clean" dens, the habit of smoking opium soon extended further up the social hierarchy.
[1] The opium dens of New York City's Chinatown, due to its geographical distance from China, were not as opulent as some of those to be found on the American West Coast.
[5][6][7] Chinese immigrants first established Chinatowns in Victoria and Vancouver in British Columbia, and here too, opium dens were common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In British fiction, Chinese characters and their association with opium dens were used to create an exotic atmosphere, often representing corruption and criminality.
[12] Companies began to export opium from India to China, selling the drug to raise the money to buy shipments of tea.
Burke and Ward exaggerated the Chinese community's true size and made much mention of gambling, opium dens, and "unholy things" in the shadows.
Some literary elite of the time including Arthur Conan Doyle (see "The Man with the Twisted Lip") and Dickens himself visited the area, although whether they themselves took up the "pipe" has remained undisclosed.
When the small number of opium dens gradually declined in London, following crackdowns from the authorities, individuals like Ah Sing were forced to move from their properties, and had to find alternative ways of making a living.
