In recent years, due to the large-scale industrialization of cigarette production, paper cigarette smokers have spread to all regions and strata of the world, and the ancient enjoyment of snuff has been squeezed out.

This is an unconvincing and helpless thing! From a hygienic point of view, snuff is much superior to cigarettes and cigars.

Smelling snuff is just to smell its fragrant breath, so as to awaken the mind and refresh the mind, drive away the filth and avoid the epidemic. It does not ignite fire and smoke, and smokes poisonous mist deep into the lungs and infects the internal organs.

Secondly, when snuff is smelled, whoever likes to smell it is wiped under his nostrils and enjoys himself. People who don't like to smell can't choke even if they are close at hand, and if you sneeze and then cover your nose and mouth with a handkerchief, then there is no disadvantage of polluting the environment.

Snuff was brought into China by Matteo Ricci in the ninth year of Wanli in the Ming Dynasty, and reached its golden age in the Kangxi and Qianlong periods, and both the government and the opposition were addicted to snuff.

At that time, people who couldn't smell snuff were probably considered old-fashioned like they were to be seen as old people who couldn't dance disco today.

When Emperor Kangxi arrived in Nanjing, Western missionaries offered a variety of things, and he rewarded all the foreigners. Just put

"SNUFF" took it. Learned people say that these foreign characters are codes, that is

"Snuff". Those who have read Qianlong Gengchen's book "Recording Fat Commenting on Stones" will also remember that after Qingwen caught a cold, she was dizzy and stuffy, and Baoyu ordered Musk Yue to bring her Western snuff to sniff, sneezed a few times, cleared the trick, and then recovered!

Paper cigarettes have also been popular for many years, has it ever had such a noble identity and glorious performance as snuff? There is also an example of the superiority of snuff, since the end of the Ming Dynasty, due to the popularity of snuff, Chinese craftsmen combined with their own national craft traditions, greatly developed the art of making snuff bottles.

Don't underestimate the snuff bottle, which is too big to be sure, but as small as a thumb, it can't hold wine or food.

However, it integrates jade grinding, gold wire inlay, carved lacquer, porcelain, sculpture, painting, cloisonne, and Gu Yuexuan's various craft technologies into one, and has become a wonderful flower of Chinese arts and crafts.

It has become a concentrated crystallization of Chinese technology. Although after hundreds of years of dispersion and destruction, many treasures have been lost.

Today, if we set foot in the world of smoking bottles, we will still be dizzying and beautiful. According to the raw materials, there are metal pots, stone pots, jade pots, material pots, pottery pots, porcelain pots, bamboo pots, wooden pots, mica pots, goose pots, ivory pots, horn pots, coconut shell pots, gourd pots, in addition to pearls, kidneys, shark skin, crane top red...... According to its broad categories, the list is too numerous to mention.

If you divide it into details, the names are more numerous. For example, it is the same porcelain pot, and it is divided into official kilns, private kilns, bucket colors, pastels, molding, openwork, blue and white and purple, sunny days after rain, enamel, kiln change...... The same jade pot is divided into white jade, green jade, jade, coral, agate, crystal...... And the agate pot should be divided into tortoiseshell, algae grass, silk wrapping, rock sugar...... If it is divided according to the shape, there are chicken hearts, fish baskets, bricks, full moons, double couplets, beautiful shoulders and so on.

There is only one round pot, and it should also be divided into flat rounds, waist rounds, peach balls, egg balls, etc. In a word, although the cigarette bottle is small, it permeates a nation's cultural traditions, psychological characteristics, aesthetic habits, skill level and style of the times.

Therefore, some good tobacco bottles are often marked at a priceless price in the international market. In 1976, a cigarette bottle was exhibited at a German auction house, which was bought within minutes for two million marks.

After the death of Mr. Stevenson, a well-known American cigarette bottle scholar, his collection of Chinese cigarette bottles sold for $1.4 million.

This Mr. Si never married, and there was almost no other good than studying Chinese snuff bottles. His research on Chinese snuff bottles is, in the eyes of his peers, almost the equivalent of Marie Curie's thesis in the eyes of atomists.

In the West there are two

"International Chinese Snuff Bottle Society". They meet regularly, read papers, and publish journals. The number of members has increased every year.

Mr. Stevenson was a member of the North American Society. We are not exaggerating to say that snuff has opened up a new field of art.

It is a fact that thousands of people have never seen a snuffbox in their lives, and they still study, work, fall in love, get married, have children, and have children.

But don't underestimate it. It has received such attention at home and abroad, and you have to admit that it has made a breakthrough in a specific field.

How many people's mental and physical labor has been spent on this thing, and how many people's lives have been transferred to this matter, so that a pile of dead materials has a soul and a spirit.

It doesn't matter if you don't smell snuff or not, but you have to admit that a fine snuff bottle is also the result of our Chinese hard work, a contribution to human culture, and an asset to all our people...... We seem to be off topic.

Originally, it was about snuff and cigarette smoking

"Comparative hygiene", how did it suddenly diverge into the smoking bottle? I heard that there is a school of writers in the West who write novels, and they advocate that they should not have any ideas or expectations before putting pen to paper.

Once you find a topic to start with, everything flows with the flow of consciousness and develops with your thoughts.

This proposition is very similar to what our ancestors said in the "Three Teachings and Returns".

The realm of "whipping the heart of the horse and galloping to the eight poles, and the oil will be driven and the nine emptiness". In this way, we don't have to bring the topic back to snuff, let's go down the river and talk about tobacco bottles.