Description
Secret Puzzle Box II has a lovely heart decoration which makes it a lovely way to hide a gift for your love.
The secret keeper puzzle box can be used as a money box with a smaller groove for coins and a larger groove on the other side for notes. And great for hiding a Gift Card or other small gift for some extra frustration!
Size: 150mm x 65mm x 50mm Space inside: 105mm x 50mm x 25mm A standard gift card will fit inside this box. but you may have to remove it from the display card it comes on.
Packaged in a sold white cardboard box with the printed solution inside. At Mr Puzzle we have opened every one of these boxes to check the quality and that the box works as expected.
Peter Rasmussen & Wei Zhang wrote to us recently to share a very interesting history about the origins of these “Secret Boxes”. Peter and Wei wrote this about these puzzle boxes:
“They are based on antique treasure boxes found in China.
Japanese puzzle boxes are very popular and are known throughout the world. Chinese puzzle boxes, on the other hand, are relatively unknown—in China as well as in the rest of the world. This may be due to the fact that Chinese puzzle boxes were produced in a geographically remote part of China and only recently made their way to antique markets in some of the cities. Or it could be because the Chinese boxes were made to serve as practical household objects, whereas Japanese puzzle boxes were intentionally created as novelties to be marketed to travellers and tourists who then spread their fame.
We’ve been collecting and researching the histories of Chinese puzzles since 1997. Occasionally we came across a box—around the size of a shoe box—that required an ingenious trick to open it. No two boxes were exactly alike, and some required a number of steps to open. Whenever we asked about the origin of these boxes, the reply was always the same: they came from Shanxi province. We began travelling around Shanxi in 1999 and found many more of these clever boxes in small rural markets. The boxes had been used by families with property to hold deeds and other valuables. One has an inscription dated “31st year of the Guangxu reign” (1905), proving that their use goes back more than 100 years. Today people enjoy the challenge of opening the boxes as puzzles rather than using them to hold their treasures.
Now Mi-Toys is producing these modern puzzle boxes based on four of the boxes in our collection. Our hope is that this will help to gain wider recognition for the lost art of making and solving Chinese puzzle boxes.”
Peter & Wei are working on: Classical Chinese Puzzle Project http://ChinesePuzzles.org You will find a wealth of fascinating information about the origins of Chinese puzzles on this website.
Tabaneske –
I bought this puzzle box for my sister, to give her a challenge, and it being useful as a money box as well. Unfortunately, her 4 year old opened it in less than 5 minutes. Her husband also opened it in less than 1 minute. I only had a limited amount to spend on a gift, but I thought the cheaper boxes would still have some ‘fun’ to them. If I knew it was going to be that easy to open, I would have just mailed her a padlock with no key…
On the plus side the quality of the box is decent, so that’s something atleast. Also postage was quicker than expected. Luckily it has a dual purpose too.
Overall I am fairly disappointed in this as a mind boggling gift. Maybe I will buy from here again in the future if I was guaranteed the puzzle would take longer to solve than boiling an egg…
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