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齐白石Qi Baishi 丁衍庸Ding Yanyong Chen Yifei 陈逸飞 Christine Mak 麦丽萍 Persian carpets Persian rug weaving jade through the ages Honshan Jade 红山玉 Anient Chinese Jade 金缕玉衣 Thru to Heaven: the taotie饕餮Liangzhu Monster Face良渚神徽

When an important person was buried in the Shang, Zhou and Han dynasties various jade ornaments were used. Shang practice merely surrounded the corpse with jade objects with no clear system or formula. Zhou linked various little jade pieces together into a face cover: jade slices with the shapes of eyes, nose, mouth, etc were sewn onto a piece of cloth to cover the face, and pieces cut into the shapes of arc, dragon/tiger, curved daggers, etc, were tied together into a large scale necklace that hangs down both the front and the back, virtually forming a vest. In Han dynasty the practice was to sew many rectangular jade pieces together into a suit that covers the person head to toe like a suit of armour. (See the next article Jade Suit for picture - the text is all Chinese)

In addition, small jade cylinders were inserted into the person's orifices that was supposed to stop his/her vital forces from escaping, and a pair of jade pigs were held in the hands to represent the holding of wealth. The piece inserted into the mouth was usually shaped like a cicada, which was supposed to live forever and it was thought to be reborn after burying itself in soil for a few years; in actual fact, cicadas burrow into soil to lay eggs and then die, and the reborn ones were just their offsprings.

The picture above shows a collection of my own Han-style jade pigs, mostly modern imitations, a set of pictures taken from the web of authentic Han cicadas, and one of unearthed Zhou burial necklace.

Aging by Jade

A curious scheme to delineate eras of Chinese history is based on the material used for weapons: Era of the Three Sovereigns (San Huang) was the age of stone, the Five Emperors (Wu Di) the age of jade, the Three Kings (Xia, Shang and Western Zhou) the age of bronze, and the Five Hegemons (Wu Ba) the age of Iron. There is some uncertainty about who exactly were the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors; the former roughly correspond to periods inventing dwellings, fire, farming and an organized form of living (or society if one prefers to be more official), while the latter denote different stages of tribal alliance formation under Yellow Emperor, Gaoyang, Gaoxing, Yao, Shun and other figures.

Perhaps equally good a scheme uses jade only: the early Neolithic age was the time of No Jade, since stone craft was too crude to produce fine weapons and tools, the late Neolithic age the time of Divine Jade, with ceremonial use of jade that is in some way able to go through to heaven; the Bronze and Early Iron ages might be called the time of Noblemanly Jade (Jun-zi Yu), symbolizing a gentle and pure kind of character, after which came the age of Decorative Jade as an artistic and craft material. The jewelry jade used in modern times is actually a different type of material, produced mainly in Burma, with no real connection to the classical Chinese jade of the bygone era.

age of no jade. The stone axe, originally a tool then weapon, came to symbolize the power of tribal chiefs. Because the less brittle jade stones could be polished into sharp blades, jade became heavily used in making weapons, which soon acquired a ritualistic function.

age of divine jade. The cong, with round hollow and square exterior, symbolizes "round sky - square land", with the hollow meaning "earth getting through to heaven". In some hard-to-fathom mental process jade became recognized as food for the gods so that ritualistic objects were jade based, till they were displaced in the Shang era by much larger bronze utensils that contained real food - another mental transformation which we do not really understand.

age of noblemanly jade. The jade bi pendant indicates status of court official/nobleman. The single piece round bi represented Round Heaven, and our modern speculation is that it fits above the cong with the round holes matching in some ceremonial fashion. This trisected form appears to be a later personal ornament. The number of bis and other precious objects e.g. shells, a person possesses was probably an indication of status and wealth. The original utilitarian and ritualistic ideas associated with jade had by then been forgotten, and the poetic expressions about why the characteristics of jade reflect those of the noble person, usually atrributed to Confucius but probably re-written in the current polished form later, actually reveal this obscurity.

age of decorative jade. A simple but charmingly effective jade horse purported to be from the Tang era; later craftsmen in the Qing era would bring jade carving into such complex forms, both artistically and technically speaking, that one feels overburdened and fatigued just looking at the results.

age of jewelry jade. More brilliantly green than traditional Chinese jade, "fei cui" or Burmese jadeite is widely used in jewelry. In good quality jadeite, the green comes from small crystal particles densely embedded inside a translucent substrate, giving it a dazzling sheen which the smooth nephrite green cannot match, but at the same time, lacking the dignified thoughtfulness that the latter reflects.

Burma Jade

Burma jade's chemical composition is sodium-aluminium silicate, while that of Chinese jade (also known as nephrite - Burma jade is also called jadeite) is calcium-magnesium-iron silicate. The supply of Burma jade is much more restricted, with virtually no source of good material other than a few mountain quarriess and river valleys (where boulders and pebbles of jade washed down from the hills are found, often by divers from river bottoms) in Burma. After a few centuries of extraction, all the easily mined sources have been nearly exhausted; while stones mined from mountain interiors are usually of lesser quality, so that any good material coming onto the market are highly priced.

The material of Burma jade itself may vary from white to almost colourless (transparent), but impurities such as chromium or metal iron/iron oxide cause various different tinges of colour to be added, green for chromium and purple/red/yellow due to iron. The green patches often form attractive embedded patterns, whereas the other colours tend to be a spread over an area, as illustrated in the above left photo's two snuff bottles and bowl. However, the most valuable Burma jade objects are of the near transparent bright green variety, which are unfortunately too expensive for me to own and are therefore absent from the picture sample.

The best quality Chinese jade is from Xinjiang, but also with a supply exhaustion problem. Recent products are therefore mostly using jade from Qinghai, Siberia and to a lesser extent Afganistan. However, though the chemical composition is the same, formed under different geological conditions such as temperature, pressure and moisture content, there are differences in chrystal structures leading to different shades of colour and surface adaptation to oxidation and environmental impurities. Xinjiang jade has a more subdued colouring which would mellow nicely with age, whereas the other types, including also Burma jade, tend to turn dusty grey, especially if the objects have been buried and are later unearthed.

Burma jade is widely used for jewelry; with the economic development of China opening up a new, vast consumer market with its own preferences, there has been a major change in the market for Burma jade: whereas the previous major markets of Taiwan and Hongkong value green jade, the mainland Chinese consumers value transparency more than colour, so that material previously mined in Burma but cast aside because of their lack of colours, are now being recovered for export to meet this new need.

Burma jade is often faked, by either taking genuine material but adding colour (the C jade) or corroding away impurities using strong acid, with the holes and gaps filled in by injecting epoxy resin (the B jade), or using other materials altogether such as quartz (silicon oxide) treated in various ways to produce what is usually called Malay jade, though it has no connection with Malaysia. With the popularity of pale coloured transparent Burma jade, lowcost serpentine is often used to produce similar looking objects.

Such alternative materials usually have a lower density than Burma jade, which provides an easy detection scheme, while the presence of epoxy resin could be detected by a simple instrument to see if a fluorescence effect appears when a type of light is shone on the object (but I was told now some epoxy fillings have an anti-fluorescent agent to counter this). High amount of epoxy filling also causes a duller ringing sound when the jade object is struck with a thin metal item (e.g., a coin) and may even look dull. Added colours differ from natural colours in being too superficial and often has an "eye-piercing" feeling. Colours added with epoxy resin would under magnifying glasses show a mesh pattern because they only exist in the cracks. The most reliable method is however by using a spectrometer to detect the spectrum of jade itself and any impurites it contains. Most shops would provide authentification certificates with what they sell, but since goods can be faked, certificates can be faked too. Valuable pieces would therefore require independent verification.

In the above diagram's bowl and snuff bottles made of Burma jade; the contrast with the Chinese jade objects is clear. See also View Slideshow View Slideshow

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