Floating Snuff (tobacco) Bottles

Chinese Snuff Bottles from the Collection

In the eighteenth century, Chinese emperors and other elites began collecting snuff bottles, which they valued both as precious objects and as containers for powdered tobacco (snuff). They first used cylindrical medicine bottles to hold this new "medicine"—introduced from Japan in the late-seventeenth century—and then experimented with new bottle shapes and added stoppers with ivory spoons attached. The Qianlong Emperor (reigned 1736–1795) was particularly fond of these miniature containers, favoring the carved glass bottles made in the Imperial Glassworks that his grandfather, the Kangxi Emperor, had established in 1696. With the encouragement of the Qianlong ruler, snuff bottle production reached new aesthetic and technological heights, and their popularity continued through the late nineteenth century.

www.philamuseum.org/galleryhighlights/112.html

 

Taken at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA

 

To all my smoking friends (you know who you are) NO this does not mean I am condoning it....I still hope one day you will all stop : )

Done