What is Snuff Bottle?

Beginning the Qing Dynasty (mid-1600's), tobacco reached China from the Americas via Japan. It was ground to a fine powder, with herbs and oils added. The Chinese used their traditional medicine bottles for storage, rather than wooden snuff boxes.

For the next 100 years the habit of taking snuff retained within the Royal Palaces, until the mid-1800's when it spread over the whole of China. Beautiful bottles were made from porcelain, ceramic, glass, enamel, ivory, and agate. Metal ones in Tibet. They were carved, painted, and overlaid, with inside painted bottles appearing around 1850. However, cigarettes then began to replace snuff. Resulting in snuff bottles designed to collect.

In old China, snuff bottles might be the epitome of Chinese Arts. A great number of high quality snuff bottles were made in Qing Dynasty and it also absorbs the advantages of the Europe and the western countries. The technology of producing it is the top of the glass's manufacturing at that time. So the Chinese snuff bottle is the signs and the wonders of the communications of the culture and arts. This wonderful and unique craftwork owns the excellent workmanship and easily carried. After the 17 century, it becomes one of the most popular fashion collections all over the world.

    
Interior Painting in Snuff Bottle

Snuff bottles are not native to China but were reportedly introduced from the West by fr.Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit father who worked in Beijing in the early 17th century. Yet the art of interior painting in snuff bottle was born and developed in China and unique to the country.

A popular story tells how the art originated. In the Qing Dynasty, an official addicted to snuff stopped on his way at a small temple for a rest. When he took out his crystal snuff bottle to take a sniff, he found it was already empty. He then scraped off a little of the powder that had stuck on the interior wall of the bottle by means of a slender bamboo stick, thus leaving lines on the inside, visible through the transparent wall. A young monk saw him at this and hit upon the idea of making pictures inside the bottle. Thus a new art was born.

The "painting brush" of the snuff bottle artist today is not very different from what the official in the story used at the beginning. It is a slender bamboo stick, not much thicker but much longer than a match, with the tip shaped like a fine-pointed hook. Dipped in colored ink and thrust inside the bottle, the hooked tip is employed to paint on the interior surfaces of the walls, following the will of the painter.

The art became perfected the flourished towards the end of the Qing Dynasty at the turn of the century. Curio dealers began to offer good prices to collect them for a profit. Snuff bottles are small in size, no more than 6-7cm high and 4-5cm wide, yet the accomplished artist can produce, on the limited space of the internal surfaces, any subject on the whole gamut of traditional Chinese painting-human portraits, landscapes, flowers and birds-and calligraphy.

Liu Shouben, a celebrated contemporary master in this field, succeeded in painting all the 108 heroes and heroines of the classical novel Water Margin, each with his or her characteristic expression, all inside one single bottle!

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