March, 1918 
27 
Jade bottle 
from Bauer 
Collection 
This one of 
glass with in¬ 
terior paintings 
Pottery of green 
glaze, with 
coral top 
Ivory with tur¬ 
quoise stopper. 
Ming 
A bottle of 
frosted yellow 
rock crystal 
Porcelain snuff 
bottle repre¬ 
senting a fish 
Blue and white 
china with a 
silver top 
Brown pottery 
with colored 
designs 
when well—which was most of the time—in 
diminutive doses, perhaps as charms, and 
when ill in quantities that would amaze and 
frighten us. Hecate and her Witches never 
prepared caldron more terrific than the Chinese 
physician of yesterday devised for his certainly 
suffering patient. The famous materia medica 
or herbal which Li Shi-chin spent thirty years 
in preparing, a work published in 1590, con¬ 
tained over eighteen hundred prescriptions 
dear to the heart, though I fear disastrous to 
the well-being of the Chinese invalid pro-tem. 
Gallon containers would not have sufficed for 
some of these prescriptions, while others—the 
least virulent, and therefore to be toyed with— 
were harbored in the tiny bottles that snuff 
was, later, to usurp. 
Miniature Chinese bottles found in Egypt 
and in Asia Minor, bottles of porcelain con¬ 
taining inscriptions in Chinese from the Chin¬ 
ese poets, show that in die 10th Century com¬ 
munication already 
Glass with applied 
black glass band 
White glass with 
coral tip stopper 
Flat porcelain with 
painted scene 
existed between the 
extreme boundaries 
of Asia. Arabs 
traded at Canton 
and Hangchow to 
the end of the Sung 
Dynasty, 1278. 
These little bottles 
were probably used 
by the Arabs for 
kohl, the black sub¬ 
stance with which 
they painted their 
eyelashes. S i x t y 
years before Li Shi- 
chin’s herbal —Pun 
tsao was its title— 
tobacco was intro¬ 
duced into China, 
and before long to¬ 
bacco as snuff be¬ 
came popular and 
fashionable. 
Among the orna¬ 
mental articles of 
Chinese dress, says 
a n authority o n 
Eastern costume, in 
none do they go to 
so much expense and 
style as in the snuff- 
bottle, which is often 
carved from stone, 
amber, agate and 
other rare minerals 
with most exquisite 
taste. Jade, of 
course, was most 
precious of all and 
often imitated in 
glass, as were topaz, 
amethyst, tourma¬ 
line, amber and 
other materials. 
Bird design in 
carved jade 
Carved jade in 
animal design 
Carved jade. Temple design 
Bishop Collection in carved jade 
Collectors in Europe and America are begin¬ 
ning to realize what interesting things in the 
way of snuff-bottles the Chinese glass-worker 
produced. 
Chinese Glass 
Of Chinese glass Dr. S. W. Bushnell says: 
“All the technical processes . . . used in 
the West in the working of glass have been 
employed in their turn in the Middle King¬ 
dom. Blowing, pressing, and casting in moulds 
have long been known; but it is by cutting, 
and especially by deep chiselling and under¬ 
cutting of pieces made by several layers of 
different color that the Chinese have created 
their most original productions. In this par¬ 
ticular line they have attained a surety of touch 
with refined taste and perfect finish of work¬ 
manship, that have not been surpassed even 
by the masters of the craft of the 16th Cen¬ 
tury in Bohemia. Chinese carvers in glass 
have always been inspired by glyptic work in 
jade and other hard stones. . . . Their 
work in these lines is comparatively easy, as 
no glass is so hard as nephrite, jadeite, and 
rock-crystal. . . . The glass objects made 
by the Chinese are generally of small dimen¬ 
sions, not larger than the jadeite or agate carv¬ 
ings which are posed as models. The ground 
is either translucent or opalescent, and it is 
tinted to give an illusory resemblance to the 
model of which it is a counterfeit presentment; 
to be detected only by a minute examination, 
or by tapping it, in Chinese fashion, with the 
finger-nail, so that its characteristic ring may 
betray it. The little vases and shaped cups 
and dishes that are often moulded of this ma¬ 
terial are intended to stand beside the ink 
palette of the scholarly writer, and are specially 
designed to please his fancy. They are fash¬ 
ioned in the shape of an egg, of a magnolia 
blossom, or of a tilted lotus leaf: decorated in 
relief, outside with an archaic dragon, a 
phoenix, a spray of prunus, or some other em¬ 
blematic flower, or with some appropriate 
monogram, with a sacred Buddhist or Taoist 
symbol. The snuff-bottles are more varied in 
their sculptured designs, being decorated, ac¬ 
cording to the fancy of the glyptic artist, with 
flowers, animals, familiar scenes, or land¬ 
scapes, lightly projected on a ground of con¬ 
trasted shade. A snuff-bottle of plain glass 
is occasionally painted by hand with the pic¬ 
ture pencilled in sepia or filled in with colors. 
In this case the colors are painted on inside 
to preserve them from friction; the execution 
of the brush work through the narrow opening 
of the bottle on the inner surface of the glass 
being a perfect marvel of skill and patience 
triumphing over self-imposed restrictions, such 
as only a Chinese artist could delight in and 
bring to a successful 
result.” It is inter¬ 
esting to note that 
the Chinese have 
never made claim to 
the d i s c o v e r y of 
glass. The Chinese 
historical work, Wei 
Luo, based on 3rd 
Century records, 
chronicles that ten 
colors of opaque 
glass were imported 
by the Chinese from 
Rome between the 
years 221 and 264. 
The Chinese them¬ 
selves did not learn 
the art of glassmak¬ 
ing until the 5th 
Century. 
Porcelain and Jade 
The fine porcelain 
snuff-bottles of the 
Celestials are indeed 
things to be treas¬ 
ured. We find them 
in endless colors and 
designs. Some are 
plain, some with un¬ 
der-glaze decoration, 
some cased with 
pierced porcelain 
casing, others with 
moulded decoration, 
and still others with 
painted decoration. 
Occasionally one 
finds a porcelain 
bottle whose glaze 
intentionally simu¬ 
lates glass. 
(Continued on paqe 
68 ) 
Rare carved white 
jade. C’hien Lung 
Porcelain with re¬ 
lief decorations 
Carved and deco¬ 
rated porcelain 
