How snuff came to China, and why it lived in bottles

In 1684 the Kangxi Emperor, then thirty, made his first tour of southern China. In Nanjing a pair of Jesuit missionaries, Gabiani and Valat, offered him gifts. He sent back everything except the snuff.

Hugh Moss has spent a long career as a dealer and scholar of Chinese snuff bottles. He calls this the earliest firm evidence of snuff at the Qing court. He reckons the emperor was probably a regular taker by then. Within twenty years the court was making its own snuff bottles.

A late arrival

Tobacco itself reached China's southern coast in the late 1500s, mostly by sea from Luzon in the Philippines and from Taiwan. For most of the following century people smoked it, first in long bamboo pipes and later in brass water pipes. Snuff followed late in that century. Not every source agrees on the route, mind. The Philadelphia Museum of Art's label for one of its bottles says snuff "was introduced to China from Japan in the late seventeenth century".

Whoever brought it, snuff started as a court fashion. Imported snuff arrived in large glass storage jars, which Moss points out weren't much use for carrying about. The same label says snuff was at first kept in cylindrical medicine bottles.

The emperor's glassworks

The Kangxi Emperor set up workshops in Beijing that made small, fine objects for the court, snuff bottles among them. In 1696 an imperial glassworks opened near the Xi'an Gate, on land the emperor had given the Jesuits three years earlier. A Bavarian Jesuit, Kilian Stumpf, ran it, probably until he died in 1720, and Moss credits him with bringing the Bavarian technique of cutting facets into glass. Glassmakers from Guangzhou and Boshan worked alongside the Europeans.

We've got a witness from those first years. Wang Shizhen wrote about the bottles in a note dated 1702. He was a senior minister and a well-known poet. "The snuff bottles are manufactured by the Imperial court," he noted, and he listed the colours of the glass, among them red, purple, yellow, white, black and green. Two of the colours impressed him most, one "clear like crystal", the other "pink like pearl". His note is the earliest known written mention of a snuff bottle in China. Snuff bottles were already being copied outside the palace, he added, though the copies weren't nearly as good.

What China kept its snuff in

In China snuff almost always went into bottles: a small flask with a stopper, and a tiny spoon (often ivory) fixed to the stopper to lift the powder out. The bottle stayed in a pocket, and makers decorated its sides.

Glass was common. Other bottles were carved from jade or quartz, or made of lacquer, and a rare few from "hornbill ivory" cut from the casque of the helmeted hornbill. Many glass bottles were coloured to look like jade, agate and other stones, and in the words of the Philadelphia label "a good imitation passed all but the closest scrutiny".

From court fashion to collectors' prize

Under the Qianlong Emperor in the 1700s, snuff bottles reached their height. Courtiers often gave them as gifts, and by the mid-1800s a gentleman was expected to own one. Snuff taking itself had spread slowly beyond the capital. As late as 1774 the French missionary Joseph-Marie Amiot described snuff as mostly a Beijing custom. Moss calls Amiot "a somewhat unreliable observer" but thinks Amiot was broadly right on this.

The imperial glassworks in Beijing declined towards the end of the 1700s and had largely stopped by 1829. Inside-painted bottles, the kind most people picture today, arrived late in the 1800s. The inner wall was treated with dilute acid, and the artist then painted the scene backwards through the narrow neck with a bent-tipped pen. Most weren't meant to hold snuff, which would have rubbed the painting away.

By the early 1900s cigarettes had taken over and snuff had gone out of fashion, but collectors went on buying the bottles. Bottles from the imperial workshops, and Qianlong-era ones above all, are the most sought after, and in 2012 one bottle sold at Bonhams in Hong Kong for HK$4,459,162.

Chinese snuff today

Baogu Snuff Master makes snuff in China today, including the Xian Green Jasmine and Green Osmanthus we stock. Our announcement introduced them.

Sources

• Hugh M. Moss, "An Overview of Qing Glass Snuff-Bottle Production", Journal of the International Chinese Snuff Bottle Society, spring 2004, republished by Pavilion Gallery (for the 1684 gift from Gabiani and Valat, the emperor's likely habit, the storage jars, the 1696 glassworks and its site, Stumpf, the Guangzhou and Boshan glassmakers, Wang Shizhen's note and the copies, and Amiot with Moss's verdict on him): https://paviliongallery.com/pavilion-archive/the-origins-of-guyue-xuan-enamelled-glass-wares-b8d69
• Hugh Moss and Stuart Sargent, The Marakovic Collection, "The Imperial Phase: The Kangxi Era, 1661-1723" (for the Bavarian facet-cutting, Wang Shizhen's crystal and pearl, and the bottle as a Kangxi-era development): https://www.e-yaji.com/Marakovic_images/Mar_nar/1_Kangxi.html
• Philadelphia Museum of Art, Snuff Bottle and Stopper, 18th century, object 210270, gallery label (for the Japan route, medicine bottles, the Kangxi workshops, court gifts, ivory spoons on stoppers, the Qianlong peak, the mid-1800s gentleman and glass imitations of stone): https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/210270
• Wikipedia, "Snuff bottle" (for tobacco's arrival and pipes, Wang Shizhen as poet and minister, his note as the earliest attested mention, bottle materials, the 1829 decline, inside painting, the turn to cigarettes in the early 1900s, collectors' preference for Qianlong imperial bottles and the 2012 Bonhams sale; it cites Olivova 2005, Benedict 2011, Moss 2004, Perry 1960, Cammann 1957 and Cooper 2014): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuff_bottle