Inside Painted Snuff Bottle with Fighting Cavalary from the Romance of the Three KingdomsThis well painted snuff bottle, rendered in the traditional gong bi manner of figure painting, illustrates battle scenes from the famous novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. My early introduction to the novel was by my Uncle Philip who spent hours entertaining my cousins, siblings and I with dramatic rendition of the story. That was the days before television and movies and we hungered for the continuation of the story. Later on, it became one of my

that someone has put together sometime ago

so successfully done in the traditional landscape painting as well as here

around the time when the Communist Party took over the governing of China and established the People's Republic of China

The glass bottle in a flatten rectangular shape is of a high quality glass

The round flatten shape of this snuff bottle with a short neck and flared foot resembles a ceramic prototype called a Moon Flask

and decorative appliques were entirely unknown until the excavations

The clay body is made of fine porcelain and is very smooth to the touch

As a young nation

The material is zisha clay from Yixxing

Dimension: 4

iron and aluminum silicate

and one the the most endearing were the figurines