Our inaugural curio arrives courtesy of Andrew's grandmother, who was part of an American Presbyterian mission to China in the early 1900s. Family lore had it that the pipe was an opium pipe, but based on an exact match example and information that I found online, it may be a pipe for smoking only tobacco.
But I am not entirely sure about that, and not because Andrew's grandmother used the pipe to escape the travails of missionary life. She was, in the early 1900s, a young woman from Delaware who during her time in Shanghai collected issues of the Shanghai Sun, a Presbyterian Missionary newspaper (of which more in another week's Curio) and acquired an ardent British suitor. After her return to the United States, he wrote her many adoring letters and even pursued her to the US, hoping for her hand in marriage (details in another Curio).
The description of the set of Chinese water pipes that match the pipe in the Curio collection is as follows:
This very unusual pair of Chinese tobacco water pipes have telescopic paktong mouthpieces which collapse into the body of the pipe and screw-on caps so that when not in use, the two look as if they are a pair of baluster-form vases. The exteriors are of copper and brass and are decorated with applied prosperity and long-life symbols.
Each of the feet are fitted with semi-circular trays that swing out. These would have been for storing the tobacco.
Like the Backman Ltd. vase pipes, the Curio collection pipe has a location for storing tobacco at the base. The water goes into the reservoir of the pipe through a hole in the top which can be seen more clearly when the second top piece is removed:
Based on what I find online, I assume that tobacco would then go in the top of the piece that fits next to the mouthpiece, meaning that it functions more or less like a bong or a hookah. Here is a good explanation of how a Chinese water pipe functions from the Amsterdam Pipe Museum's page on waterpipes. Interestingly, the pipes may have been signed, which may be the signature on the inside of the tobacco storage area at the bottom of the Curio pipe. The same double X marks are repeated on the bottom of the pipe.
The small area where the tobacco appeared to go was the top of the shorter stem that comes out of the top next to the pipe stem.
The symbols on the Curio pipe resemble those on the Backman vase pipes. According to the Backman site, the matching vase pipes are decorated with prosperity and long-life symbols. The Curio pipe only features what is most likely the long-life symbol, as rendered here in the top square:
The question is whether the pipe was also used for opium?
Was it part of a pair of water pipes?
As we continue to search through the hundreds of boxes of family curios, we will try to find the answer to these questions.
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