Sujet

Sketches from China - Chinese Opium-smokers, 1858. Creator: Unknown.

Légende

Sketches from China - Chinese Opium-smokers, 1858. Note woman on right with bound feet. 'The rooms where the Chinese sit and smoke opium are surrounded by wooden couches, with places for the head to rest upon...The drug is prepared with some kind of incense, and a very small portion is sufficient to charge it, one or two whiffs being the utmost that can be inhaled from a single pipe; the smoke is taken into the lungs, as from the hookah in India. On a beginner one or two pipes will have an effect, but an old stager will continue smoking for hours. At the head of each couch is placed a small lamp, as fire must be applied to the drug during the process of inhaling... A few days of this fearful luxury, when taken to excess, will impart a pallid and haggard look to the features, and a few months, or even weeks, will change the strong and healthy man into little better than an idiot-skeleton...these infatuated people may be seen...laughing and talking under the effect of the pipe...The last scene of this tragic play is generally a room in the rear of the building, a species of morgue, or dead house, where lie those who have passed into the state of bliss the opium-smoker madly seeks - an emblem of the long sleep to which he is blindly hurrying'. From "Illustrated London News", 1858.

Crédit

Photo12/Heritage Images/The Print Collector

Notre référence

HRM23A82_259

Model release

NA

Property release

NA

Licence

Droits gérés

Format disponible

27,8Mo (2,6Mo) / 32,8cm x 21,2cm / 3870 x 2508 (300dpi)

Mots clés

female women woman people male interior man men arts pipes pipe country fan drug China art Chinese guy preparation burning British lying color smoking hair braid braids war addiction location century Britain inside reclining preparing newspapers press print hairstyle concept opium plait plaits B&W lying down pigtails pigtail hairdo addict addicts preparations engraved engraving addicted drug addiction paraphernalia hairdressing handheld Colour drug addict 19th century Indoors black & white black and white B W recumbent hand held white and black tobacco pipe drug addicts nineteenth century The Print Collector Illustrated London News opium pipe Opium Wars ILN opium den bound feet foot binding footbinding newspaper Unknown foot-binding drug user drug users 19th-century