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Bottles for Snuff
The museum owns the whole collection of small graceful bottles for snuff, which don't like European snuffboxes at all. Though these things rather resemble female bric-a-bracs everything seems to indicate that men only used them. Looking on these tiny vessels it is difficult to assume that something so prosaic as snuff was kept there. However, all snuffs are not alike. And the mix that was contained in these bottles consisted of 4 % snuff only. It included 25 ingredients, on the whole these were various aromatic grasses and snuff was only one of them.
Of coarse, the receptacles for the most delicate precious aromas were made of expensive materials. Foremen used precious and decorative stones (jasper, amber, etc.), porcelain, carved lacquer for manufacturing these articles. But the most amazing ones are glass bottles decorated with refined internal painting. Together with the others they illustrate splendidly one of the main principles of the East attitude to life - aspiration to enjoy harmony and to admire beauty of all environmental world up to the trifles of everyday life.
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