*The Buddha Shakyamuni as an ascetic B60J13

© Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Didactic Material in this Gallery:

• How is Jade Worked?
• Jade in Chinese Culture
• What is Jade?

How is Jade Worked?

Jade cannot be carved by using chisels or other tools of traditional stonecraft. Instead, it must be shaped through rough grinding and polishing. Perhaps as long as 7,000 years ago Chinese carvers discovered they could surmount the obstacle of jade's hardness using the technique of abrasion. They used stone, animal bone, bamboo, and wooden tools in combination with wet sand. Through the ages, abrasion has remained the basic method of working jade; the procedure, in brief, is as follows:

• Select, sift, and dilute in water the sands for abrading the jade. The sands must be very hard; coarser grades are used for roughing in the shape, and fine grades for polishing.
• Using these sands and the available technologies, saw open the rough stone and divide the stone into useful blocks.
• Cut the jade into a shape that approximates the form desired.
• Cut the final rough form from this initial shape.
• If the object is to be a container, drill out the interior to form a hollow.
• Decorate the surface of the piece through grinding, drilling, and other methods of abrasion.
• Polish the surface of the decorated piece.

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Jade in Chinese Culture

The objects in this gallery reflect an ongoing appreciation of jade in Chinese culture, which over thousands of years has evolved and accumulated many associations and levels of significance.

• Jade has been worked in China longer than anywhere else in the world. As early as seven thousand years ago, it was endowed with profound ritual significance. The earliest Chinese dictionary, compiled some two thousand years ago, lists more than a hundred characters referring to different types of jade. Confucius (approx. 500s BCE) compared the qualities of jade to the virtues of a gentleman, saying that:
  

  Its polish and brilliance represent the white of purity. Its perfect compactness and extreme hardness represent the sureness of intelligence. Its angles, which do not cut although they seem sharp, represent justice. The pure and prolonged sound it gives when struck represents music. Its color represents loyalty; its interior flaws, which reveal themselves through its transparency, call to mind sincerity.

• During the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), jade was described as prolonging life and guarding against evil spirits.
• Jade's association with supreme beauty is epitomized by the story of Yang Guifei, consort of the emperor Xuanzong (reigned 712-756). Yang Guifei is said to have slept on a jade bed, wearing only jade ornaments and surrounded with jade objects. She met a tragic death and was immortalized as the Jade Beauty.
• Jade is extremely difficult to work. The importance of shaping jade has been compared to the importance of educating people:
  

  … without being worked, jade cannot be shaped into a vessel; without being educated, people cannot be shaped into virtuous citizens. (A Song dynasty Confucian primer)

• The Qianlong emperor (reigned 1736-1795) praised jade workers:
  

  Not many artisans can rival those who have mastered the magic of carving jade.… Such exquisite work sparks others to strive for the ideal!

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What is 'Jade'?

In its narrowest definition, yu, the Chinese word for jade, refers to two distinct hard, fibrous stones, jadeite and nephrite. In its broadest definition yu also includes serpentine, quartz, and many other gemstones.

At the molecular level, nephrite is composed of dense mats of relatively long fibers, making it a tough stone that has a high resistance to breaking or chipping and finishes to a soft glow. Jadeite, made of shorter fibers, is harder than but not as tough as nephrite; jadeite has a resistance to scratching or abrading, and finishes to a bright shine. In their pure states, both stones are white and semitranslucent. The broad range of hues and tones seen among the jade objects on display here is the result of various chemical impurities.

While there are deposits of nephrite elsewhere in China, most modern sources are in the northwestern province of Xinjiang. Importation of nephrite from Xinjiang began no later than the Bronze Age, and it contributed to the development of the trade route known as the Silk Road. Jadeite is rarely found in China and did not come into common use until the mining of large deposits in Burma began in the late 1800s.

Examples of jade on view in this case call to mind the Chinese definition: "Jade [yu] is the beauty of stones."

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