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Crystal glass containers as novel artefacts in the early modern period acted out their function of containment as miraculous material events. Focusing on glass containers used to contain and constitute Buddhist objects in China's Qing dynasty (1644–1911), this essay provides historical and critical views on issues of aura and containment. Primarily, it examines the modalities and experiences of container and containment as expressed in the Qing court's material, religious and political practices. In doing so, the essay highlights the fusional relationship between matter and form, while also apprehending the metamorphosis between image and object in processes of transmedial translation and transcultural crossing or dislocation. It argues that glass containers used to simulate, animate and amplify the 'aura' of devotional objects manifested more general religio‐political and intercultural phenomena at that time. Those phenomena in turn invite reflections on material objects' immaterial expressions, and vice versa, in terms of the interplay between formal schema and amorphous force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]