清十八世紀 涅白料磨花八方鼻煙壺

永興行，香港，1985年11月
Hugh M. Moss Ltd，1993年

Hugh Moss、Victor Graham 及曾嘉寶，《A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles: The Mary and George Bloch Collection》，卷5，香港，2002年，編號802

Barely perceptible chip to the inner lip. A minute chip on one of the hexagonal side facets.
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Reasonable control of a range of white glass had been achieved at the court by the late Kangxi period. Something in the ingredients for white glass seems to have prevented crizzling, so one is deprived of this criterion for dating it. There are, however, other possible guides to dating, including the size of the mouth, although this is by no means entirely reliable. In blown glass it is as easy to produce a wide neck as a narrow one, and it is interesting that relatively wide mouths are a feature of most of the bottles that have been identified as likely to date from the early phase of glass production at court.

There is a cogent reason for assuming that a wide neck was the early standard. In the early Qing dynasty, the snuff itself was of primary importance, with bottles seen as no more than elegant containers. Only a little later, probably some time after the end of the Kangxi period, did the snuff bottle begin to be viewed as a work of art in its own right. Just as one might expect that smaller sizes would tend to indicate a period when snuff was rare, mostly imported and expensive, one could also assume that initially convenient access to bottle’s contents would dictate the relative size of the mouth. A wider mouth, which facilitates such access both for filling and emptying the bottle, was therefore probably a feature of very early bottles.

Each main side of this bottle has a distinct concavity to serve as an integral snuff dish. Were it not intended as such, there would be no point in going to the trouble of creating this feature, since a flat panel would serve the same decorative end. The small size of the integral dishes reflects, of course, the small size of the bottle itself, but both may be an indication of a time when snuff was more highly valued and would have been used in smaller portions.