1860-1930

Pink tourmaline was a popular material in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in China and was used for jewelry, decorative carvings, snuff bottles and snuff bottle stoppers. While a great percentage of extant tourmaline snuff bottles were long attributed to the late Qing dynasty or Republic period, recent scholarship has revealed that tourmaline bottles were also made during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See Moss, Graham, Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles, The Mary and George Bloch Collection, Vol. 3, Hong Kong, 1998, pp. 103-5, no. 407, for a discussion of tourmaline bottles and the scholarship leading to their re-attribution.

Compare to a bottle of similar form and color from The Ruth and Carl Barron Collection of Fine Chinese Snuff Bottles: Part I, Christie's New York, 16 September 2015, lot 247.