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China's 9,000-Year Fascination With Jade: The Fine Art of Stone Carving
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14100 |
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THE ARTS
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1 / 1988 |
1,883 Words |
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Suzanne Wright
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For nine thousand years, jade has been an object of fascination for the Chinese, much as gold has been for the West. Jade has been prized for its beauty, value, strength, and for less tangible qualities, such as its reputed ability to engender longevity. An entry in a dictionary written by Xu Shen about A.D. 100 notes that jade possesses five virtues, symbolized by characteristics of the stone: charity (warm luster), honesty (translucency), wisdom (purity of tone when struck), courage (durability), and equity (sharpness injuring no one).
For the Chinese, jade stands for all that is beautiful, moral, and worthy. These associations are reflected in Chinese language in which a "jade person" refers to a beautiful woman, a "jade heart" to someone of great purity.
Until the Sung dynasty (960-1279), the Chinese word yu, usually translated simply as "jade," could be applied to any semiprecious hard stone, including quartz, marble, agate, and serpentine. Later the term zhen yu, or "true jade," was introduced to refer specifically to this stone. In fact, there are two minerals, quite different in composition and structure, that are now considered to be true jade: nephrite and jadeite.
Nephrite is a rock-forming mineral of the amphibole family, a silicate of calcium and magnesium. Jadeite is a silicate of sodium and aluminum and belongs to the pyroxene family of minerals. Both stones are very hard. On the Mohs scale, devised by the German Friedrich Mohs (1773-1839) to measure the relative hardness of minerals, nephrite rates a 6.5 and jadeite a 6.75. (The scale ascends from talc at 1 to diamond at 10.) Although nephrite is slightly softer than jadeite, it is actually somewhat tougher because of its compressed fibrous structure; jadeite's crystalline structure is more susceptible to breakage. In many cases, though not all, jadeite and nephrite can be distinguished by appearance. Nephrite is a more opaque stone with a waxy look and feel to its surface, whereas jadeite takes a higher polish and usually appears translucent and rather glassy.
Since the Neolithic
Nephrite has been in use in China since the Neolithic era (8000-2000 B.C.). Jadeite, on the other hand, was unknown in China until the eighteenth century, when it began to be imported from Burma. As far as is known, neither stone has ever been found in China proper, an astonishing fact in light of the long history of Chinese jade carving. China's main source of nephrite was and still is the rivers and mountains near Khotan in eastern Turkestan, located in the modern-day Sinkiang Uighur Autonomous Region. In fact, the two rivers that flow on either side of Khotan are named the Karakash (Black Jade River) and Yurungkash (White Jade River). Because of jade's durability, it resists erosion longer than many other stones and can often be found as pebbles in riverbeds. When these sources began to be exhausted in the late sixteenth century, jade was traced to its source in the Kunlun Mountains and quarried there.
Jadeite was first mined in Burma in the seventeenth century and was exported to China through the southwestern province of Yunnan in the eighteenth century. It was not immediately accepted as the equal of nephrite by Chinese scholars, but its value soon surpassed that of the "other jade." Burma is still the most important source of jade, legally exported as well as
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