Wikipedia
Chinese boxes 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.
The Russian matryoshka doll is a modern interpretation of this form.
As with the above example, such 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, a novel or drama that is told in the form of a narrative inside a narrative (and so on), giving views from different perspectives. Examples include Plato's dialogue Symposion, Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, Jostein Gaarder's The Solitaire Mystery, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
Usage examples of "chinese boxes".
The woods enclose and then enclose again, like a system of Chinese boxes opening one into another.
Another of the Chinese boxes had been opened, though yet another box lay inside it.
With its tiered walls and hierarchical courtyards, one inside the other like Chinese boxes, it covered several acres.
A well-to-do person might possess as many as three such coffins, each smaller than the last, fitting inside one another like a set of Chinese boxes.
It had three levels, the top two removable, all three containing little drawers as cunning as Chinese boxes.
These interrelations are much more like the ones found in a nest of Chinese boxes or in a set of concentric spheres, for according to emergent evolutionists, a given level can contain other levels within it [i.
With that, we turned to the tidal waves of cash and the interlocking corporate shells, each protecting another series of interconnected shells which concealed yet another, like Chinese boxes.
It was as if she had opened a series of Chinese boxes, one within the other, but the final, smallest box, holding the kernel of the mystery, had remained stubbornly locked.
Express (which is itself a box in motion) and then decide which of these chosen media then get to move all the way into the extreme rear's salon to interface with McCain himself, who is the campaign's narrator and narrative at once, a candidate whose biggest draw of course is that he's an anticandidate, someone who's open and accessible and ``thinks outside the box,'' but who is in fact the campaign's Chinese boxes' central and inscrutable core box, and whose own intracranial thoughts on all these boxes and layers and lenses and on whether this new kind of enclosure is anything like Hoa Lo's dark box are pretty much anyone in the media's guess, since all he'll talk about is politics.
In that way, his life - what little of it he remembered - was like a nest of Chinese boxes that never ended, or like peering into an endless hall of mirrors.
Successive ideas were arising, one out of another, like Chinese boxes, and each one in turn had to be examined for flaws.
Then there would be a veritable cacophony tohold in check, with dense layers of frame stories and a myriad ofinterpolated histories with several narrators on different narrativelevels, or what some people call Chinese Boxes.
But the BIS is not a monolithic institution: artfully concealed within the shell of an international bank, like a series of Chinese boxes one inside another, are the real groups and services the central bankers need - and pay to support.