Colors and designs of luxurious Chinese snuff bottles – 04/02/2019

The National Museum of Oriental Art inaugurated the exhibition Message in a bottle, which shows the snuff bottles used in China from the 16th century to the 19th century. More than 200 bottles were donated to the museum by Argentine collector Jorge Torre Bertucci and can be seen today during the tour.

The exhibition truly tells the story of how tobacco has traced since its discovery in America until it arrived in China. He entered the era of Emperor Kangxi (1654-1722) during the Qing Dynasty. Although smoking has been banned since 1638 in China, Japan, Turkey, Ireland and England, snuff was believed to have energetic and medicinal properties and its use was well regarded.

It has been used to treat rhinitis and other respiratory and gastric diseases and even headaches, far from the recommendations of contemporary medicine.

The word snuff comes from the French "grated" and refers to the way it was produced: the roll of tobacco was grated with a small grater and kept this powder in a small box or bottle, which contained a minimum teaspoon to suck it. Sometimes, in addition, "the snuff team" included a rabbit leg to mop up the nose.

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The habit of snuff, as was the case in Europe, began early in the upper clbades, then he became popular until he became fashionable. Gradually, they went from simple containers of tobacco to become luxury items, with value for themselvesespecially when no snuff has been eaten. Although today, at Oriental antique fairs, from Buenos Aires to Taiwan, bottles can be bought for $ 100 each, the most complex and the oldest – most dating back to the time of the Qing dynasty – which can reach the 700 thousand dollars with which one of them was auctioned in 2007 at Sotheby's, acquired by a Taiwanese collector.

At first, they were simple bottles that had to fit in the palm of the hand between index finger and thumb, but they were then sophisticated. They became luxury items, whose possession showed the status and elegance of their wearer. It was a craftsman who worked inside the Forbidden City and had the idea of ​​shaking the neck of the bottle so that the contents were not wet.

On the way he was transformed, he recounts inside the museum the following legend: "During the Qing Dynasty, a snuff-loving officer realized with pain that his little bottle was empty. of bamboo, he scraped the dust that had been stuck inside one of the walls and, in doing so, lines were drawn inside.A young monk who saw him had the 39, idea to paint them inside to beautify the container. "

The bottles are made of materials such as stone – jade, amber -, silver – in which are encrusted emeralds or other precious stones -, copper, porcelain, glbad and bamboo. The glbades are painted inside with curved brushes and you can see the process and technique through a video in the example.

For generations, they have been produced in Beijing, Boshan, Inner Mongolia, Guangzhou, Liaoning and Tibet. In fact, the bottles of Mongolia are known to be silver, Tibet in other metals and those of Liaoning Province for their agates

For the glbad bottles, another method was used, a technique of engraving and engraving on superimposed glbad, called a cameo, taught by Jesuit missionaries. The use of this technique has been so successful that the glbad with which they worked in China has become internationally known as "Beijing Glbad". During the reign of Kangxi, an emperor known for his protection of the arts, more than 20 imperial workshops of snuff boxes were opened in Beijing, offering the highest quality for personal use of the members of the court. As if this were not a problem, the drawings express good wishes to those who possess beauty: for example, in Chinese symbols, a locust and a cabbage plant signify "happiness".

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The exhibition at the museum ends with a question asked to all visitors about the objects of our daily life, do we choose them, do they represent us? However, it also invites us to consider China as a cultural and even geographical region closer. The antipode of Buenos Aires, according to GeoDatos, is the city of Hede, in Jiangsu, China, but the reality is that cultures have always lived off their own exchanges. We are not so far, not so close.

The Chinese New Year celebrations – which took place this weekend – showed that the pig, jewel of the Chinese zodiac, grumbled slowly and brought abundance. In this context, the Chinese Embbady has proposed a cultural tour that continues and includes the exhibition Message in a bottle, conferences at the Confucius Institute of Buenos Aires and visits to restaurants serving typical dishes where you can enjoy traditional dishes. Those who participate in five of these planned activities may have access to a lottery for a trip to China.