Let’s face it: not many people come to Thailand for the museums. Bangkok’s thousands of night-life venues are high on the list of attractions, but fewer visitors feel an obligation to view the antiquities at the national museums in Bangkok or Chiang Mai. This is due in part to the upstaging of Thai civilization by the Khmer; for many tourists to Southeast Asia, Cambodia with its temples at Angkor is the cultural must-see.
So what to do when full-moon parties draw more visitors than your national treasures? Thailand has made various attempts to play down, and then clamp down on, the sex and drugs that have titillated and lured the wrong kind of visitorsbut to no avail. The newest approach is a mingling of high and low culture in Chiang Rai province’s royally sponsored Mae Fah Luang Foundation’s Hall of Opium. There is a certain brilliance to marketing the infamy of the Golden Triangle. This is one of those rare nether regions that lives up to the swashbuckling image that its name evokes. Highways crisscrossing Chiang Rai province are still frequently bottlenecked by police checkpoints set up to foil smugglers of Burmese methamphetamine and heroin.
Today, there are few living witnesses to the devastating effects of smoking opium, the resin of the same poppy plants from which heroin is derived. In the early 1950s, newly communist China took draconian steps to rid its population of addicts, but the vice lingered for another decade in the expatriate-Chinese communities of Southeast Asia. Thailand was the last place in the world with licensed opium dens. In 1959 those licenses were revoked; the Heng Lak Hung on Bangkok’s Charoeng Krung Roadsaid to be the world’s largest opium den, with more than 5,000 users in residenceshut its doors, and thousands of opium pipes, lamps and other smoking equipment were burned in a massive bonfire at the royal cremation grounds near the Grand Palace.
In the past few years, however, aficionados of Asian art and antiquities have rediscovered the dens’ often delightfully ornate accoutrementspipes, oil lamps, pipe bowls, opium trays and beds. When curators began gathering artifacts for the Hall of Opium, some of the best pieces were found in the Thai Excise Department. “Luckily, department officials in charge of the destruction of the opium paraphernalia kept the most beautiful pipes they confiscated in 1959,” explains Charles Mehl, a former Peace Corps volunteer and longtime resident of Thailand. (Mehl is head of research at the new museum, which was designed by Thai interior design firm Siam Studio.) These pipes are part of the museum’s collection, including one fashioned from the gnarled wood of the Thai phrik khi nu chili bush, which was said to impart a spicy flavor to the opium smoke. Also on exhibition are dozens of pipe bowls, the bulbous feature that sets an opium pipe apart from an ordinary tobacco pipe. Roughly the size of a doorknob and produced in myriad shapes, the pipe bowl was a canvas on which Chinese artisans displayed their talents. Patterns on pipe bowls ranged from geometrical designs, such as the Hindu swastika (also used in Buddhist art), to whimsical portraits of Chinese roosters, tigers, dragons and phoenixes, to floral renderings of bamboos, orchids and peach blossoms. To those versed in Chinese iconography, this is rich irony: these positive attributes so artfully symbolizedlongevity, strength, happiness and wealthwere all certainly lacking in the lives of the average opium addict.
The Hall of Opium uses a multimedia approach to trace the history of opium from highly valued ingredient in the pharmacopoeia of the ancients to the scourge of addiction that brought China to its knees in the 19th and 20th centuries. There is a re-creation of a British East India Company clipper ship’s hold and its cargo of opium from India destined for the South China coast and a reproduction of a typical 19th century opium den, where a visitor can take himself through the opium smoker’s paces (sans opium, of course). Patrons, according to this life-size diorama, entered through an innocuous-looking tea shop. The poorer users could choose doses of low-grade opium self-administered in spartan surroundings. Better-heeled junkies could smoke pipes of pure opium prepared by servants in opulently furnished rooms. Lest visitors get carried away amid their reveries, the curators have mounted cautionary tributes to entertainers who overdosed, such as River Phoenix and Zhu Jie.
Atypically for museums in the region, the Hall of Opium is much more than a collection of dusty artifacts bearing labels. Interiors at the museum complement the subject matter so as to profoundly affect visitors’ moods. The entrance to the museum is through a long, winding tunnel, which is illuminated to show off twisted and tortured human forms sculpted into its walls. Other rooms are bright, airy contemplative spaces. The result is an informative and innovative look at an age-old social ill. What can Thailand do to top it? A museum of the world’s oldest profession, in the heart of Bangkok’s infamous red-light district? If done this well, one can only hope so.
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