Vintage Chinese Reverse Painted Glass Snuff Bottle with Qingming Festival Scene. This stunning piece of history has a round clear body with a gourd shaped interior painted from within with a scene from the Qingming Festival, or Tomb-Sweeping Day, a traditional Chinese holiday observed in early April (usually April 4th, 5th, or 6th) that honors ancestors and celebrates the arrival of spring. Started over 2,500 years ago during the Zhou Dynasty, core traditions include cleaning ancestral graves, leaving food offerings, burning joss paper, and enjoying outdoor activities. The stopper has a green stone, and no spoon attached. 

Size: 4 x 3 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. 

Snuff bottles were used during the Qing Dynasty to contain powdered tobacco, as smoking tobacco was made illegal early on during the Qing Dynasty, but the use of snuff was allowed because the Chinese considered snuff to be a remedy for common illnesses such as colds, headaches, and stomach disorders. The public use of snuff decreased with the fall of the Qing Dynasty and died away soon after the establishment of the Republic of China. However, contemporary snuff bottles are still being made, and can be purchased in souvenir shops, flea markets, and museum gift shops. Original snuff bottles from the Qing period are particularly sought after by serious collectors and museums. The most valuable ones include inside painting, a genre that emerged in the late Qing Dynasty. In general most snuff bottles were small enough to fit inside the palm of the hand, and were made out of many different materials including porcelain, jade, bone, wood, coconut shells, lapis lazuli, gneiss, cork, chalcedony, jasper, carnelian, malachite, quartz, metal, turquoise, agate, mother-of-pearl, and ceramics, though probably the most commonly used material was glass.

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