Ping Zhan: Smooth Reverse Calabash Stack with Boxwood Tobacco Pipe

I would say Ping Zhan was pushing some limits with this design. Firstly and most obviously, in terms of compact charm; there are shapes that skirt the line between proper Nosewarmer and just merely a shortish pipe, but this Zhan creation skirts nothing. It is very, very much a Nosewarmer, the shank and stem together being only as long as the bowl is tall.

Secondly there's the matter of how much of a reverse-Calabash you can tuck into such a short shape, as in, how much volume of cooling chamber. Ping Zhan packed a lot. Part of this is by the trick of running it all the way under the tobacco chamber, which is to say trading off tobacco chamber depth in favor of cooling chamber length. The tobacco chamber's depth does still remain decent, but more importantly this arrangement also allows the cooling chamber to more effectively act as a condensation-collector as well, since it places the draft-hole at the bottom dead center of the tobacco chamber, and at the very top of the cooling chamber.

- Eric N. Squires