The Snuff Dreams Are Made Of : Art: Chinese boxes represent centuries of craftsmanship in tiny, clever packages.

Just think of Pamela R. Lessing Friedman’s art collection as a message in a bottle. In 200 Chinese snuff bottles, to be precise--133 of which are on display at Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana, and many of which are decorated with symbols and the pictorial wordplay known as rebuses.

“The Chinese language lends itself to pictorial puns,” Friedman said recently by phone from her home near Denver. “It’s filled with homonyms--sounds that are the same but have different meanings.

“A bat, for instance, is fu . Blessings is also fu. So when you see a bat it refers to blessings. If you see five bats, you know it’s the five blessings of life--wealth, health, old age, natural death and . . . I’ll have to look up the other.

“The words for upside-down and arrived are also the same,” she said. “So if you see a bat upside down, blessings or happiness have arrived.”

The show, which first opened at the Denver Art Museum five years ago, is on view at Bowers through Sept. 24. When Denver’s Asian Art Coordinating Council organized the exhibition, Friedman’s collection was ranked fifth in North America; while that ranking may still be accurate, there have been so many changes in the field that Friedman says she is more comfortable saying it is in the Top 10 (Top 20 in the world).

Tobacco from the New World was first introduced to the Chinese by the Portuguese in the 16th Century, and by century’s end it had become quite popular. The 17th-Century Emperor Chongzhen, however, felt that smoking was detrimental--it took three centuries for the U.S. surgeon general to come to the same conclusion--and Chongzhen issued an edict prohibiting tobacco’s sale on punishment of decapitation and public display of the severed head.

Sniffing snuff, a mixture of herbs and tobacco believed to have curative powers, replaced smoking as the preferred mode of consumption. Because the powder quickly went stale in the humid Chinese climate, it was kept in small medicine bottles with stoppers. Snuff enthusiasts and gift givers began to choose bottles bearing rebuses appropriate to the occasion or situation; the bottles evolved into an art form.

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Chinese snuff bottles in Friedman’s collection, which she’s been amassing since 1976, run a gamut from ink stone to porcelain, from carved jade to granite.

Said Friedman: “Quartz and chalcedony bottles were hollowed out with the most primitive tools, yet some, carved perfectly, flawless, you can almost see right through. You can see the snuff inside! One bottle is actually a gourd, with the plant grown inside a wooden mold.”

Some of the bottles are exquisitely detailed, and some--such as one amber bottle embellished with soapstone, cinnabar, mother of pearl, jade, coral, mammoth tooth and coconut shells, “really just about everything you can think of,” Friedman said--are too elaborate to include in a traveling exhibition.

It was a glass bottle in the window of an antique gallery in Washington, D.C., that first caught Friedman’s eye.

“I saw something the size of an aspirin bottle that [appeared to have] the most incredible paintings on it,” she recalled. “But the paintings were not on the bottle; they were inside the bottle.”

Inside the gallery were more than 100 Chinese snuff bottles of all types. She learned that the bottle in the window had been painted “through an opening the size of a fingernail using a single-hair brush. And they’re painted in watercolor and ink--a single drop of water would destroy their beauty forever. I thought this was the most remarkable thing--and I could afford it.”

At the time, Friedman said, “I was 26 or 27 years old, and I thought I would never spend so much money--it was less than $1,000. This bottle is now, shall we say, quite valuable.”

Friedman came from a family of collectors and grew up surrounded by beautiful paintings, books and furniture. The area of collecting she chose would soon suggest a Chinese rebus involving bats among clouds: good fortune.

“At the time, 1976, one was buying nice snuff bottles for $100 to $200, truly magnificent bottles for $500 to $1,000,” Friedman recalled. “If you were spending a few thousand dollars, you were getting the most incredible items. Now, the finest bottles are in the $75,000 and up range and climbing so steadily that everybody is astonished. Today the range is $50 to $120,000.” (A week later, Friedman reported that a bottle had sold for $175,000 in an auction at Sotheby’s in London.)

She was quick to point out that there are still bargains to be found:

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“It is amazing how one can walk down Madison Avenue and see something in the window that’s a bargain. I know a man who [bought a snuff bottle] for under $300 knowing he was walking away with something worth $20,000, and that bottle is now worth $90,000. These things are still available, but one has to know what one is doing.”

One is immediately struck by the size of the bottles--most are between two and three inches tall. A snuff spoon is attached to the stopper and cork; surprisingly, Friedman freely mixes and matches corks and bottles depending on whimsy. (According to Janet Baker, Bowers’ curator of Asian art, stoppers were designed to complement rather than be a match of exact material, so there has always been a certain amount of freedom in pairing stoppers with bottles. In addition, stoppers are frequently lost, mixed up, or damaged over time, so substitutions are common.)

The aesthetic appeal of the bottles, which date from the mid-17th to early-20th centuries, can be as tactile as it is visual.

“The one thing I regret about this exhibition is that people cannot hold a bottle in their hands,” Friedman said.

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Terese Tse Bartholomew, curator at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, identifies some 50 rebuses in her essay for the show’s catalogue. These might involve catfish and fungus, persimmons and a scepter, fish wrapped in a lotus leaf, magpies and prunus plants.

The seemingly endless variety of decorative elements makes Friedman say that “each bottle has its own personality. Each, in fact, speaks with me. There were problems putting together the [catalogue] because they were all complaining that they each wanted to be the cover bottle. . . .”

She continued on a more reflective note.

“I [know that I] am just a temporary caretaker,” Friedman said. “These bottles have been owned by many people before me, and I hope by many after me.

“The reason this exhibit exists is the pleasure I’ve had sharing this art form with other people. It’s something most people have never seen. It’s the complete art of the Qing dynasty, right here in miniature form.”

* “Chinese Snuff Bottles From the Pamela R. Lessing Friedman Collection” is on display at Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana. Hours: Tuesday through Sunday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Thursday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Through Sept. 24. $1.50 to $4.50. Children under 5, free. (714) 567-3600.