清十八 / 十九世紀 瓷胎浮雕描金礬紅彩豆莢式鼻煙壺

Hugh Moss (HK) Ltd，1987年

Robert Kleiner、楊伯達及 Clarence F. Shangraw，《盈寸纖研 ─ 瑪麗及佐治伯樂鼻煙壺珍藏》，香港藝術館，香港，1994年，編號181
新加坡國家博物館，新加坡，1994-1995年

Hugh Moss、Victor Graham 及曾嘉寶，《A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles: The Mary and George Bloch Collection》，卷6，香港，2007年，編號1338

Some minor nibbles towards the base on the back joint of the bean pod. Areas of the highlighted gilding missing, worn from use. Original stopper has a porcelain tube inside the neck of the bottle which is missing a fairly large chip, but not visible with the stopper in place.
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Quite unlike any imperial type, this appears to be a rare model produced for a wider audience. Another feature suggesting that it is not imperial is the odd integral porcelain hollow cylinder that forms part of the stopper. What remains of it is just under two centimetres long, but the end is broken, preventing one from knowing how long it was to begin with. This was probably not the shaft of an integral porcelain spoon; there would be no point in going to all that effort to hollow out a shaft just to make it so easy to snap off.

One must remember that, although the traditional fitting for snuff bottles in China was a spoon attached to a tight cork, that was not the only system used for extracting snuff, and the bottle was not always refilled through the neck. In the Mullin Collection there is a Mongolian-style snuff bottle fitted with a traditional spoon, but with a central plug in one main side for filling the bottle (Moss and Sargent 2012, pp. 261 – 262, no. 275); there is another (pp. 260 – 262, no. 274) where the stopper has a spout with a hinged lid so that the snuff could be tipped from the bottle, presumably onto a snuff dish.

Most importantly, there are rare examples where a short cylinder was attached to the cork. When the bottle was tipped upside down, the cylinder would fill with snuff, which could then be removed and deposited on a snuff dish, providing a consistent amount for each delivery.