Amsterdam's 750th Birthday

27 ottobre 2025

Every year on October 27th, the city of Amsterdam celebrates its birthday. This year is particularly memorable, as the city has been granted city rights just 750 years ago. Festivities, neighbourhood parties, sport events and exhibitions have been held throughout the year. On this day, the mayor cuts a birthday cake for the entire city, a cake 750 meters long. A grand music festival concludes the celebrations this evening. The Amsterdam Pipe Museum is delighted to be located in this city.

Asian Pipe Lecture

18 ottobre 2025

The Tribal Art Fair at De Duif in Amsterdam has become a tradition. Traders and enthusiasts of ethnographic objects gather annually, not only from the Netherlands, but also from England, Belgium, and France. This year's theme is Asia. Benedict Goes has been invited to give a lecture on the smoking pipe in Asia. As you know, our collection contains ample material for a colourful slideshow. The lecture will take place on Sunday, October 26th, at 2:00 PM. Interested parties can obtain free tickets from the organizers or at our museum. See https://tribalartfair.nl/.

World Pipe Smoking Championship

12 ottobre 2025

This coming weekend, the World Pipe Smoking Championship will take place in Eindhoven. For this occasion, pipe smokers from all over the world will travel to our country for this competition in slow smoking. Numerous participants will combine their trip with a visit to our museum. One of them is Andrew Aoba, none other than the Chief Director of the Pipe Club of Japan. We showed him some of the typical Japanese kiseru pipes displayed in our study. Walking past the library's bookcases, with 50 meters of books, he suddenly stopped and pointed to one particular volume, saying, "That's my book!" That's worth a photo: the author with his own book from our library.

Wonderful Kiseru

4 ottobre 2025

Over the next few months, we'll be displaying a bizarre pipe in our center display case: a recently acquired ceramic kiseru with colourful painting. It's an unmistakably Japanese pipe with an extremely thick stem, but a standard-sized bowl and mouthpiece. This thick stem allows for extra smoke circulation and thus perfectly cooled smoke—a prerequisite for porcelain smoking. The colourful painting à la Japonaise, in fashionable colours dominated by red and turquoise is remarkable. The bowl and stem are elegantly decorated with gold lacquer. This showy pipe surfaced in Düsseldorf, but the owners knew nothing about its provenance. It's not often that we, too, couldn't pinpoint its exact origin. Perhaps one of our visitors knows its provenance or maker. The object will remain on display until the end of the year.