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the main hub of Amsterdam’s small but vibrant Chinatown. Its seaward end is home to a couple of the oldest bars in the city, and the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker famously died here in 1988, when he either fell or threw himself out of the window of the Prins Hendrik Hotel – an event remembered by an evocative plaque of the man in full blow. Further down, there are any number of Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese foodie treats, as well as the Fo Guang Shan He Hua Temple, on the right at Zeedijk 106, just 100m or so short of Nieuwmarkt (Tues–Sun 10–5pm) – a Buddhist temple heavy with the smell of incense and sounds of chanting. There’s not much to see here but for a small donation you can pick your own ready-made dharma out of a box.

The Old Centre | The Red Light District |

Oudezijds Achterburgwal

A block across from OZ Voorburgwal, Oudezijds Achterburgwal is another pretty canal, but like its neighbour long despoiled, at least in its lower reaches, by Red Light sleaze. Those after just a taster of this should drop by the popular Erotic Museum (daily 11am–1am; €5), with its four floors of Victorian porn, statues and drawings, mock-ups of prostitutes’ rooms, reels of cartoon porn featuring Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, and a bondage room at the top – all good fun, and in a way the perfect topic for the location, though it’s debatable as to how erotic it really is.

To the south is the Hash Marihuana Hemp Museum at Oudezijds Achterburgwal 148 (daily 10am–10pm; €7; www.hashmuseum.com), the first and most established of a number of dope “museums” along this stretch. As well as featuring displays on the various types of dope and numerous ways to smoke it, the museum has an indoor marijuana garden, samples of textiles and paper made with hemp, and pamphlets explaining the medicinal properties of cannabis. There’s also a shop selling pipes, books, videos and plenty of souvenirs. Amsterdam’s reliance on imported dope ended in the late 1980s with the emergence of hydroponic growing techniques, whereby marijuana – and in particular a reddish variety bred in America, called “skunk” – was able to flourish under artificial lights without water. Nowadays over half the dope sold in the city’s coffeeshops is grown in the Netherlands, and this place is positively evangelical about how to join in.

Across the canal, next door to Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185, at Spinhuissteeg 1, the Spinhuis was once a house of correction for “fallen women”, who were put to work here on the looms and spinning wheels. Curiously, workhouses like this used to figure on tourist itineraries; for a small fee the public was allowed to watch the women at work, and at carnival times admission was free and large crowds came to jeer and mock. The justification for this was that shame was supposed to be part of the reforming process, but in fact the municipality unofficially tolerated brothels and the incarcerated women had simply been singled out for exemplary punishment. The Spinhuis has been turned into offices, but the old front door has survived intact, with an inscription by the seventeenth-century Dutch poet Pieter Cornelisz Hooft: “Cry not, for I exact no vengeance for wrong but to force you to be good. My hand is stern but my heart is kind.”

On the other side of the canal, the triangular parcel of land at the southern end of Oudezijds Achterburgwal is packed with university buildings, mostly modern or nineteenth-century structures built in the vernacular Dutch style. Together they form a pleasant urban ensemble, but the early seventeenth-century step-gabled Huis op de Drie Grachten (“House on the Three Canals”), with its red shutters and mullion windows, stands out, sitting prettily on the corner of Oudezijds Achterburgwal and Oudezijds Voorburgwal.

The Old Centre | The Red Light District | Oudezijds Achterburgwal |

Red Light District trouble

The police estimate that there are around a thousand hard-drug users in Amsterdam, who, as they put it, “cause nuisance”, and there remain a few groups of drug addicts who hang around on the northern edge of the Red Light District.