The very appearance of tobacco and the establishment of the tobacco smoking tradition are connected with the domination of the Qing Empire of China in the Uryanghai region. Rustic tobacco, leaf tobacco, and Chinese tobacco were the most popular goods of Chinese and Russian merchants.

Chinese snuff was especially popular with Tuvan people, and its properties were much milder than those of the strong Russian tobacco and leaf tobacco. Snuff was stored in special boxes.

When Mongols and Tuvans met, the first thing they did was exchange pipes, pouches, and snuffboxes by turns. Smoking together was a pretext, a way to get to know a new person, to have a heart-to-heart talk with them. There was a whole tradition of exchanging snuffboxes.

The use of tobacco was especially popular among the Tuvan nobility, who also highly valued Chinese snuffboxes. The most precious were snuffboxes made of “polished onyx of Chinese work, ” which only the Tuvan nobility could afford. More common were bottles made of red and blue carved and plain glass.

A snuffbox (khoorge) is a small bottle, carved from a solid stone, designed to hold dry snuff. Snuffboxes first began to be made in China as medicine bottles for headaches and colds.

Regardless of what size, shape and decoration a snuffbox has, its main part consists of a stopper, in which a special spoon is inserted for extracting portions of tobacco from the bottle. Stoppers are usually decorated with different stones. The most common are red “caps” imitating coral.

Elena Baikara, a veteran of the museum work in Tuva, made a great contribution to the formation of the museum’s snuffbox collection. The chronological classification allows us to divide snuffboxes from the museum’s collections by time of their use. The main part of the collection belongs to the late 19th — early 20th century.