Chinese boxes (Chinese: 套盒; pinyin: tàohé) are a set of boxes of graduated size, each fitting inside the next larger box.
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.
References
References
- Zhang, Benzi (1993). "Paradox of Chinese Boxes: Textual Heterarchy in Postmodern Fiction". The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée. 20 (1 and 2): 89–103 – via University of Alberta Library.
- Sakuma, Chihiro (November 29, 2013). Narrative Structures and Space in the English Romantic Novel: An Intertextual Study of Mary Shelley, Charles Maturin and the Brontes. Dissertation (Ph.D. thesis). Graduate School of Humanities and Sciences Tokyo Woman’s Christian University. Retrieved December 2, 2025.
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