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The underworld of the East : being eighteen years' actual experiences of the underworlds, drug haunts and jungles of India, China and the Malay archipelago / by James S. Lee.
LIBRA - Special HV5801 .L44 2000
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- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Lee, James S., 1872?-
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Lee, James S., 1872?---Travel--East Asia.
- Lee, James S.
- Lee, James S., 1872?-.
- Narcotics--East Asia.
- Narcotics.
- Subculture--East Asia.
- Subculture.
- Manners and customs.
- Travel.
- East Asia--Description and travel.
- East Asia.
- East Asia--Social life and customs.
- Penn Provenance:
- Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)
- Physical Description:
- xxi, 170 pages ; 24 cm
- Place of Publication:
- London : Green Magic, 2000.
- Summary:
- Underworld of the East is the remarkable story of James Lee who, starting in 1895, spent 20 years pursuing all the pleasures and dangers that the Far East had to offer. He travelled with an open mind more in common with our modern times and recorded with stunning candour and great insight a world where few of his contemporaries dared to venture and speaks vividly across time to the Twenty-First Century reader.
- Far more than almost any other example of the turn-of-the-century travel genre, it presents our jaded palates with the sort of Orient of the Mind which we imagine far more often than we get: a twilight world of ports, red light districts, drug dens and secret chambers of vice from Aden to Kyoto, and our guide not some prurient flaneur protesting his shock and disbelief at every step but a mining foreman from Yorkshire who, during the course of the book, is largely preoccupied with smoking, swallowing and injecting as many drugs as possible. (From the introduction)
- Finally he tells us of his discovery of two mysterious drugs in the jungles of Sumatra which - if their existence and effects are to be believed - would offer not only spectacular new highs to the drug connoisseur but nothing less than a fortune to the pharmaceutical industry.
- Contents:
- Chapter 1 About Drugs 1
- Chapter 2 Go Out to India 3
- Chapter 3 The Coming of the Tiger 9
- Chapter 4 I Meet Mulki 14
- Chapter 5 I Learn to Inject Morphia 17
- Chapter 6 Strange Waking Dreams 22
- Chapter 7 The Return of the Tiger 28
- Chapter 8 The Healing of the Wound 34
- Chapter 9 The Delights of Hashish 37
- Chapter 10 A Trip to Calcutta 41
- Chapter 11 Investigating the Calcutta Underworld 45
- Chapter 12 We Travel by Night 51
- Chapter 13 The Mutiny Cities of India 57
- Chapter 14 The Death of Healy 60
- Chapter 15 I Go to the Malay Archipelago 62
- Chapter 16 In the Jungles of Sumatra 67
- Chapter 17 A Railway Terminus in the Jungle 70
- Chapter 18 In the Chinese "Bongsals" 74
- Chapter 19 A Strange Waking Vision 78
- Chapter 20 Singapore 84
- Chapter 21 The Loading Wharf 89
- Chapter 22 I Discover the Elixir of Life 94
- Chapter 23 Lost in the Jungle of Sumatra 96
- Chapter 24 The Rhinoceros 100
- Chapter 25 The Beachcomber 106
- Chapter 26 The Underworld of the Ports 110
- Chapter 27 Strange Thoughts and Visions 115
- Chapter 28 Calcutta is Startled 118
- Chapter 29 Thugs and Dacoits 124
- Chapter 30 Piccadilly 128
- Chapter 31 The Gold Coast 133
- Chapter 32 Rio-de-Janeiro 140
- Chapter 33 The Shanghai Underworld 143
- Chapter 34 The Chinese City 148
- Chapter 35 A Trip to Japan 153
- Chapter 36 How the Poor Live 160
- Chapter 37 Visions 163
- Chapter 38 An Adventure 166.
- Notes:
- Originally published: London : Sampson, Low, Marston & Co., 1935.
- ISBN:
- 0953663116
- 9780953663118
- OCLC:
- 43971354
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