Imperial  Jade Myanmar Chinese  
   

Jades

Natural Jade jewelry

held at the Myanmar Gems Emporium Hall in Yangon twice per year. Six-hundred and twenty-six gem merchants representing 227 companies from fifteen countries attended the fair to inspect and buy at auction the astonishing variety of gems and pearls on display. The hall held treasures to dazzle even non-experts. What makes the whole also a great experience are the great different color, its a feast for the eyes.

Imperial Jades in pebble form or rock took over the ground floor corridors of the hall and the sprawling outdoor compound. Even the pillars of the hall, built in 1993, were built entirely of small Imperial Jade tiles!

Since the days of the ancient Burmese kings, foreign traders and merchants have been drawn by the country’s superb gems. The story goes that the first French gem merchants were astounded by the quality of some Nga Mauk rubies and declared them to be priceless.

The awe of the French gem traders is best captured in a magnificent mural that decorates the lobby of the Gems Emporium Hall.

The mural features jades miners at work, treasure chests and salvers filled with precious stones and kings and noblemen displaying rubies to foreign visitors who are wide-eyed with a amazement. 

Standing tall in the middle of it all is a bejeweled queen representing Mother Myanmar sprinkling eugenia sprigs as a sign of welcome.

The esteem for Myanmar gems continues to this day. For this reason, hundreds of visitors arrive each year in Yangon to participate in the gems fair first held in 1964 and which is now held twice annually, in March and October.

Many reference books on gems acknowledge Myanmar to be the foremost producer of first-class rubies, sapphires and imperial jade. Indeed, the world’s commercial quantities of Imperial Jade are now believed to come only from Myanmar.

There are two kinds of Imperial Jade. Imperial Jadeite, which is considered superior because of its clarity and nephrite, is mined in Myanmar at Mogaung and other sites in Kachin. It is said that Imperial Jade was so abundant that chunks of the precious stone were used by Shan noble families as door-stoppers!

They smeared the Imperial Jade blocks with water, “…to bring out the color and its intensity”, explained a jeweler from Hong Kong, examined stones with a flashlight to check for cracks and a magnifying glasses to study gems for inclusions.

The vast majority of visitors to the gem emporium came from Asia including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand. Imperial Jade was the main attraction. Said a buyer from Taiwan: “I am only here to look at Imperial Jade, because my customers back home prefer it to other gemstones”. Explaining the Chinese partiality for Imperial Jade, he added: “The Chinese believe that Imperial Jade is a living stone;

The fair and jade exhibition is divided into two sections. The ground floor features displays of uncut as well as cut and polished gems and Imperial

Jade as well as jewelry pieces —sapphire, ruby or Imperial Jade rings, earrings, bracelets and pearls set in gold, with or without diamonds. There are inexpensive pieces for sale such as Imperial Jadeite rings for US$1 baroque Imperial Jade pieces for US$3, Imperial Jade bracelets for US$30 and for the indulgent, Imperial Jade chopsticks at US$80.00 a pair.

There are more expensive jade pieces of course, US$3,500 for an exquisite Imperial Jade tea set consisting of a pot, six cups and a tray, splendid Imperial Jade carvings from simple animal figurines to more complex Buddha images. There are ruby cabochon rings set in 18-carat gold going from US$100, sapphire rings from US$150 and pearl rings from US$90. For those with larger budgets there are ruby-encrusted gold pens for US$2,000.

All gems and jewelry on the ground floor can be bought over the counter from the vendors who represent joint ventures between private companies and the government. Items offered are of good quality and feature surprisingly contemporary designs. Authenticity is assured and a certificate for customs clearance is issued with every purchase. All told, 129 lots of gems, 38 lots of Imperial Jade, 5,705 jeweler pieces and 5,261 pieces of Imperial Jade carving valued at US$4.16 million were available for sale over the counter. The second floor features gems, pearls, Imperial Jade stones and carvings exhibited by government-owned mines and sold only by auction. In a competitive bidding process sealed bids are received for each lot and the highest bid over the reserve price wins the particular order. Some gems were so coveted that the bid was several times the reserve price! A single imperial Imperial Jade semi-cut piece for instance, weighing 66.1 grams with a reserve price of US$3,500 sold for US$10,001.

Auctioning began at a slow pace in the morning of the first day but in the afternoon, the pace quickened. There was still much examining of the gems every time a lot was called for bids. A mind-boggling 339 lots of gems, 621 lots of Imperial Jade and 120 lots of pearl valued at a total of US$18.6 million were put up for auction. Not all lots received bids.

The percentage of gems jewelry and imperial jade successfully auctioned off varies from fair to fair. Emporiums turnovers are up to US$ 15 million, twice per year. It is estimated that some 60 to 80 per cent of all lots on display are sold at each Emporium.

Said a Imperial Jade merchant from Hong Kong who was on his 15th visit to the Myanmar Gems Emporium, “Myanmar is the only place where you can find Imperial Jade in such quantities. Some years, I have found really good quality imperial jade in form of imperial jade dragon, imperial jade bracelet, imperial jade pendant, imperial jade necklace, Jade earring, imperial jade jewelry and raw pure jade at reasonable prices; other times, I couldn’t find anything I liked or the prices were too high. But I have to come here every year anyway to see what’s in the jade market.”

Despite some reservations about price, most of the visitors to the Myanmar Gems Emporium agree on one thing, the gems are of superior quality to those found elsewhere and many gem dealers and jewelers are willing to pay the price.

7000 years of Chinese Imperial Jade from the collection of Sir Joseph Hotung

Imperial Jade has been prized by the Chinese for over seven thousand years as the most precious of all materials, and has been believed to possess near-magical properties. Its enduring and ageless surface texture came to be associated with

Jade Handcrafted in China

immortality, while its abstract qualities represented a pinnacle of simplicity and elegance of design. No other culture has valued Imperial Jade or any other material for such a length of time, nor indeed accorded any material such literary and philosophical attention. From the middle of the Zhou period (1050-256 BC) onwards, the physical qualities of the stone have served as a metaphor to describe the human soul. According to an ancient text, the Zhou Li, dating to about the fourth century BC:

Anciently superior men found the likeness of all excellent qualities in Imperial Jade. Soft, smooth and glossy, it appeared to them like benevolence; fine, compact and strong, like intelligence ... its flaws not concealing its beauty, nor its beauty its flaws, like loyalty; with internal radiance issuing from it on every side, like good faith. (1)

In a later text (c. 280-233 BC), the Han Feizi, there is a story about a

man called Bian He, who presented an uncut Imperial Jade to two succeeding kings, neither of whom believed that the rough boulder really contained Imperial Jade and had his feet amputated as a punishment.

He cried out in despair, explaining: 'I am lamenting not the loss of my feet but for the calling a precious gem an ordinary stone and for the dubbing of an honest man a liar.'

The Chinese Jade treasure inside was then extracted and polished; the moral of the story is still quoted today to illustrate how hard it can be for some people to recognize excellence when it is hidden under a rough exterior. (2)

From June to September 1995, the British Museum displayed an exhibition of Imperial Jades from the collection of Sir Joseph Hotung. This proved a very popular exhibition, and the British Museum is very fortunate that it is now able to devote a whole gallery to Chinese Imperial Jade, which opened in November 2002.

We are delighted that Sir Joseph Hotung, who has been collecting Imperial Jades for over thirty years now, has agreed to allow his Imperial Jades to be exhibited on a long term loan basis. The Imperial Jades are on in the gallery, room 33B, leading directly off the Hotung Gallery of Oriental Antiquities.

This gallery is called the Selwyn and Ellie Alleyne Gallery, after the couple who generously funded the refurbishment of the space. This means that there is now a gallery in the British Museum dedicated to Chinese Imperial Jade, a material which has been associated with the Chinese since Neolithic times and prized by them above the gold and gems we rank so highly in the West. Sir Joseph's Imperial Jades are augmented by a few private loans and British Museum Imperial Jades, together with some comparative material in other media. Imperial Jade is still highly prized by the Chinese and we are also showing some twentieth-century pieces to illustrate the fact that good contemporary Imperial Jade carving still exists in China today.

Imperial Jade is a hard and exceptionally tough material, and one line of research is concerned with the manner in which it has been worked and the development of Imperial Jade carving techniques since Neolithic times. For this reason, at the same time as planning this exhibition, we have also instituted a project in collaboration with our scientific research department. They are conducting an investigation, using optical and scanning electron microscopy, to ascertain different techniques of carving by examining the minute tool marks left on the Imperial Jades. We hope this will allow a relative chronology for the development of Imperial Jade carving to be established, perhaps establishing a link between 'style' of carving and 'technology'. The results should also help to establish the date at which objects were carved, a frequent problem in the study of Imperial Jades. My colleague, Margaret Sax, who is in charge of this project will describe this work later in the article.

When we exhibited Sir Joseph's Imperial Jades in 1995, I wrote about some of the early pieces in APOLLO, (3) so this time I will focus on some later Imperial Jades. Sir Joseph's collection of Imperial Jade, with the exception of a few newly acquired pieces, is illustrated and discussed in great depth by Jessica Rawson in the catalogue printed originally in 1995, which has been reprinted especially for this new exhibition. (4) The exhibition is laid out in a chronological fashion along one wall of the gallery, with various highlights picked out in three cases on the other side: they include a case on the Neolithic culture of the Liangzhu, another devoted to animals and humans from the Han dynasty to the present and a third on the pictorial quality of later Imperial Jades. (5)

The section on later Imperial Jades in the chronological part of the display features a Imperial Jade belt set for a man and a pendant set, probably for a lady. In the post-Han period, Imperial Jade was widely used for personal ornaments, such as pendants, belt, dress and hair ornaments, jewelry and small objects to hang about the person. In the earlier period of Chinese history, Imperial Jade played a pivotal role in ceremony and ritual. However, in this later period its significance in such contexts gradually diminished, and it was more important for worldly display than display to spirits in the tombs. Belt sets were introduced to China from the Steppe area. Gold, silver and gilt bronze examples, comprising a variety of plaques and a buckle section first appeared in the third and fourth centuries AD. These designs were simplified in Imperial Jade: round or shaped plaques were cut square; openwork or pierced and relief designs were cut as incised lines or simple relief on a flat surface. The constraints imposed by Imperial Jade as a material did not, however, inhibit its use.

By the Tang dynasty, Imperial Jade was established at the summit of a hierarchy of materials for belts.

Such emphasis on Imperial Jade was probably in part a consequence of the Tang imperial family's interest in Daoism. Within religious Daoism, Imperial Jade was used to describe many aspects of the immortal worlds. Once established as the primary material for belts, Imperial Jade remained at the top of the hierarchy in subsequent dynasties. During the time of our exhibition, 'Gilded Dragons, 1999: Buried treasures from Ancient China', I wrote in APOLLO, about Imperial Jade belts and various other ornaments which we borrowed from China at that time. (6)

The Tang dynasty complete belt set illustrated here belonging to Sir Joseph Hotung, is undecorated; it would have been worn as an indication of rank as stipulated by the regulations of the time, and--since Chinese robes did not have pockets--would have had various implements, including knives, suspended from it.

For aristocratic and rich ladies, hair ornaments, bracelets and earrings were important accoutrements, and I illustrated several in the APOLLO article of 1999. (7) In the case, together with the man's belt set, we are showing a pendant set, with illustrations clarifying how ladies wore them. We know, however, from various texts of the Tang period that such pendants were worn by both sexes, and that they were symbols of rank. They were prevalent from the Six Dynasties period (265-589 AD) onwards. The color of the Imperial Jade indicated to which rank its wearer belonged. Thus, the first rank officials wore mountain-dark Imperial Jade, while others above the fifth rank wore water-green pendants. These ornaments were obviously used both in life and then taken to the grave to show the bureaucrats of the underworld their wearers' status in the hereafter. The Chinese have traditionally always been very concerned with hierarchy and status. Even in the Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD), they were taking mortgage deeds with them to the afterlife to prove to the officials there that they owned the entitlement to the land on which they were buried. These pendants sets of Imperial Jade are illustrated on figures such as those found in the Tang dynasty tomb of Princess Yongtai and other tomb murals. Apparently part of the purpose of these sets was also to weigh down the hem of the skirt to prevent it from fluttering in the wind when walking. (8)

During the Han dynasty, Chinese ideas about immortality had undergone fundamental changes. Notions about the underworld and paradises to which the dead might go were modified, such new beliefs being known as religious Daoism, an indigenous Chinese religion. The dead were no longer thought to live primarily in their tombs, but rather to go to an afterlife in paradise, so models, rather than the real things, were now placed with them and precious objects were no longer buried. Imperial Jade became closely linked with the Daoist search for immortality and the Daoist paradises were described as being luminous like translucent Imperial Jade, and filled with Imperial Jade immortals and animals. The belief that eating powdered Imperial Jade would help mortals to reach these miraculous realms, as well as other similar beliefs, became prevalent. (9)

Prior to this period Imperial Jade vessels were probably a rarity, because of the wastage involved in their manufacture and the difficulties involved in carving thin, curved walls. However, during the Tang dynasty some Imperial Jade vessels were made which copied foreign gold or silver shapes, partly in an attempt to assist those who sought immortality through drinking or eating from such precious Imperial Jade vessels. They were obviously very luxurious, and ownership implied great wealth and status. Many such metal vessels had been used in Buddhist ceremonies, having been introduced to China by the non-Chinese rulers of northern China during the Six Dynasties period. They were gradually adopted into secular usage by the aristocrats and elite of the Tang period. Cups in Imperial Jade were thus linked with a search for immortality assisted by Imperial Jade. The Hejiacun hoard featured in our exhibition 'Gilded Dragons' included several vessels in gold and silver, (10) whose shape is similar to that of this lobed dish in Imperial Jade.
 

The prototypes of this jade perhaps originated further west in Iran, in gold and silver and occasionally in glass. (11) Probably by the time this Imperial Jade cup was crafted its foreign origins were already obscure. As with the belts and the jeweler, the choice of Imperial Jade was both a mark of high standing within the Chinese scale of values and probably also an indication of a concern with immortality, as drinking from a Imperial Jade cup would transfer some of the precious, immortal essence of Imperial Jade to the drinker.

In the new Alleyne gallery, we are showing examples of all the above types of vessels. From the Song period (970-1279) the emperors, partly in order to bolster their legitimacy, printed catalogues of the imperial art collections.

The Chinese had of course invented printing, and used moveable type printing from the Song period onwards. From the Ming period, the widespread use of such books with woodblock illustrations affected the manufacture of all types of utensils.

These books circulated images of famous paintings, calligraphy and antiquities, as well as designs for such utensils as ink cakes and ink stones. As a result, forms and decorations developed in one material were readily copied in another. Imperial Jade carvers, no less than craftsmen working in other media, were inspired in this way.

During the mid- to later Qing period, the Chinese controlled the area along the trade routes to Khotan and Yarkand from which most of their Imperial Jade now came. Many larger vessels were made in this later period in imitation of archaic shapes, originally associated with bronze. The collection of antique bronzes belonging to the Qianlong Emperor (1736-95) was published in the Xi Qing gujian. (12) A Qing dynasty covered vessel, in the shape of an archaic bronze fang yi, dates to the eighteenth century. It reproduces in Imperial Jade a rectangular section (fang yi) vessel of the Shang or early Western Zhou. (13)

Both sides of this rectangular jade screen are carved with mountainous landscape scenes, a setting for the Eight Immortals, legendary figures within Daoist folklore, and the God of Longevity, Shou Xing. The Eight Immortals are said to have lived at different periods and to have attained immortality through an understanding of Nature's secrets. They are divided into opposed pairs, each of which represents the two sides of a different condition of mankind: poverty, wealth, age, youth, male, female and so on. They all have identifiable attributes. (16) Again, the whole composition is treated like a painting or printed image and was probably based on a particular woodblock illustration, such as that from the Fang shi mopu. (17)

The old man holding a fan seated on the top of the tower and platform is Zhongli Quan, the leader of the Eight. Next to him is He Xiangu, holding a peach; and the third figure is Li Tieguai, holding a gourd, from which there rises a long streamer of mist; he is always depicted as an emaciated beggar, leaning on a stick. On the ground to the left of the tower stand four further figures. Reading from left to right, they are: Cao Guojiu, holding a pair of castanets; Zhang Guolao, holding the yu gu, a musical instrument in the shape of a bamboo tube with two rods to beat it; Lu Dongbin, carrying a fly-brush and his emblem, a sword; and Han Xiangzi, the patron of musicians, playing a flute. The eighth immortal is Lan Caihe, generally regarded as a woman, but sometimes shown as a boy, and seen here on the extreme right, carrying the customary emblem of a basket of flowers. Above the whole scene, mounted on a flying crane, is Shou Xing, the God of Longevity.

As mentioned earlier, establishing the date at which Imperial Jade objects were carved has so far proved problematical; by contrast, in the case of ceramics thermo luminescence tests have been used for many years. What follows is an account by my colleague in the Scientific Research Department of the British Museum, Margaret Sax, of the work she is doing to try and remedy this situation with regard to Imperial Jade.

She was responsible for the Selwyn and Ellie Alleyne Gallery of Chinese Imperial Jade, which opened in November 2002.

Currently she is writing a book on Chinese Imperial Jade, and working with the British Museum's scientific research department on a project analyzing ancient lapidary skills related to Imperial Jade working. Margaret Sax is a special assistant in the Department of Conservation, Documentation and Science at the British Museum.

She has specialized for many years in research into ancient lapidary techniques and is now focusing on the carving of Chinese Imperial Jade.

COPYRIGHT Apollo Magazine Ltd. & Gale Group