That is the story which was told to me one day when, happening into a Chinese shop where some antiques and curios were offered for sale, I chanced to pick up a tiny bottle. It was not over two and a half inches high. Its weight proclaimed it crystal. A miniature scene and inscription were skilfully and beautifully painted inside.
“This,” said the intelligent Chinese attendant, in answer to my question, “is little bit painting. Story one man artist man very much great. Him name Wu Tao-tzu.”
Then he told me the story, a golden nail on which to hang a bottle! Surely enough, there was depicted Wu Tao-tzu entering the cavern. The inscription vouched for the incident.
“But what a tiny bottle! What was it used for?”
“Much little bottle China old time fine like this. More other bottle kinds use snuff for, medicine for. Look yes you please.”
The Celestial showed me how the ivory “spoon,” running the depth of the bottle and fastened in the coral stopper, was manipulated to fetch forth portions of anything a vial of this sort might contain. In snuff-taking the “spoon” was emptied on the thumb nail and the “sniff” deftly taken. That was my introduction to the fact that snuff-taking in the Orient had fostered a fashion that produced objects of virtue fully as interesting and beautiful as, and certainly more curious than the snuff-boxes affected by the Europeans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
After this is it any wonder that the collector’s instinct should have led me to be enthusiastic about Chinese snuff-bottles as a field for browsing? And soon I found that the fascination of these little objects of art had exerted no small influence on other collectors.
Fine snuff-bottles were not to be found at every turning. Nevertheless they were not so rare as one might imagine, although, as with any other class of art objects, supreme examples were difficult to obtain at any price. If China has a population of four hundred million souls it must not be assumed that her craftsmen have produced anything like four hundred million snuff-bottles. True it is that men, women, and children of China smoke, but they do not all take snuff.
Nearly all of these bottles that we see in collections are, perhaps, snuff-bottles, though many of them were used for medicines, as the Chinese were great medicine-consumers. They used medicines 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 of herbal which Li Shi-chin spent thirty years in preparing, a work published in 1590, contained 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 bearing inscriptions in Chinese from the Chinese poets—show that in the tenth century communication already existed between the extreme boundaries of Asia. Arabs traded at Canton and Hangchow to the end of the Sung dynasty, 1279. These little bottles were probably used by the Arabs for kohl, the black substance with which they painted their eyelashes. Sixty years before Li Shi-chin’s herbal—“Pun tsao” was its title—tobacco was introduced into China, and before long tobacco as snuff became popular and fashionable.