Snake Brand Prickly Heat Powder

The tin is tall and rectangular, with softened corners, a gilt rim and a white screw cap over a perforated shaker. A band of red roses and green leaves runs round its top and bottom. Between them, on a white ground, a green snake lies coiled in the grass, an arrow through its head, above the words Snake Brand Prickly Heat and, in a red panel, Classic. Inside is a fine white powder of talc and kaolin, scented and laced with menthol and camphor, which feels cold on skin.

The snake is older than the powder. It was the trademark of the British Dispensary, a Western pharmacy opened in Bangkok in 1892, and Thai customers who could not pronounce the English name called the shop after it. In 1928 the business was bought by Luan Vongvanij, a pharmacist who had started there as an apprentice. The company tells of Dr Luan mixing a cooling powder for a foreign lawyer whose heat rash would not clear, and naming it after the complaint.

The year it went on sale is less certain. The maker's own history says production began in 1952. The importer's site and two Thai business papers give 1947, and one newspaper 1937. What is agreed is that the powder came out of Luan's work on cooling liquid powders in the 1930s, and the maker calls it the first such Thai brand made by Thais. Its name, in English, became a household word for the remedy.

The tin has changed little. Manager magazine recorded in 1992 that the earliest tins were paper before they were made of metal, and the centenary tin issued that year already wore the rose borders. Lavender and other scents have since been added, but the Classic stays the original. It is still made by the Vongvanij family's company, and is exported across Asia and sold in Britain.