Chinese boxes

For the plant known as "Chinese box", see Murraya paniculata.

Chinese boxes (Chinese: 套盒; pinyin: tàohé) are a set of boxes of graduated size, each fitting inside the next larger box.

Nested Buddhist reliquary caskets from the Tang dynasty

A traditional style in Chinese design, nested boxes have proved a popular packaging option in the West for novelty or display reasons.

Chinese nested boxes have inspired similar forms of packaging around the world, but also have found use as a figurative description, providing an illustrative example to demonstrate situations of conceptually nested or recursive arrangements.

In literature, a Chinese box structure refers to a frame narrative,^[1] where a novel or drama is told in the form of a narrative inside a narrative (and so on), giving views from different perspectives. Examples include Plato's dialogue Symposium, Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, Jostein Gaarder's The Solitaire Mystery, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights,^[2] and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

See also

• Recursion
• Mise en abyme
• Matryoshka doll
• Infinity