Opium Pipe History

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As items progress through time, they accrue a sort of history. It could be symbolic of the people or cultures using the items or markings, cuffs, and damages to the item, or even the written accounts of the use and production of the item. No matter the case, all of these and many more scenarios give an object a background that can explored throughout time. The object’s origins, appearance, function, social connotations, and where the object ends up all go into the history and meaning regarding the item. The opium pipe is one of such objects. When discussing opium pipes, one cannot leave out the drug being utilized: opium. Opium itself has a long, rich, and destructive history throughout China and as such, the opium pipe seems to follow in line with the drug. The exact origins of the opium pipe seem to be unknown, though one could assume that opium pipes arose around the same time as opium itself began to circulate the world during the seventeenth century. While the exact origin of the opium pipe is unknown, the Chinese wrote a detailed myth in which a red faced god with six arms approached the founder of the Chinese empire, the great Yellow Emperor. When the god approached the emperor, he blew three mighty breaths, each creating an aspect of an opium pipe. The first being the pipe itself, made of bamboo; the second was a poppy, the source of …show more content…

It almost became a necessity to smoke opium if you were Chinese and the people did not object. This can be seen from the record that “70 percent of the people in Shanxi, men and women alike, smoked opium. ” Knowing the integration of opium into Chinese society and the amount of people that used it brings up the question: how did it get to be like

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