The Danish author Johannes V. Jensen visited Shanghai in the early 20th century where he was introduced to opium smoke. He describes the taste and aroma of the smoke in ”Introduction to Our Age” from 1915:
Opium smoke tastes and smells like the old, black honey that has been sitting in the hives for years and has almost turned to resin; like malt; like all the bees and blossoms that have ever hummed or released their fragrance between the fire of the sun and the virgin Earth during an eternal summer before the struggle for existence entered the world; opium smells like burning amber, the soul of a dead firwood, smoldering conifers in a solar fire that return to life after millennia; like the wax on the horns of a young Pan as he rubs them against the bark of a tree and baas at a dryad; like girlfriend with a sheepskin around her waist and our young hanging in a bag on her back, by the fire on the steppe when the fire hides in shame of the summer sun and becomes invisible...the bees flit endlessly between the flowers and is it buckwheat cakes you're baking for me in the ash and do you sear them slightly, yourself above the fire, flushed and sweaty and smelling sweetly, eternally beloved steppe and summer woman who is pregnant yet again? I nod...you smell like the sleep, like my noon time sleep on the steppe stretching endlessly to every side and the sun in the brows and the smoke of wild wood on the fire and my horses pissing not far away...you smell like a short nap of a thousand years, lay one of your braids on my mouth before I find my eternal rest, let me draw my last breath through your hair...
(From Johannes V. Jensen: Introduction to Our Time, 3rd edition, Gyldendal 1929, p. 165)