| Original Message: Re: May I ask for an opinion from Tibet............... |
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All those strands look very Nepalese/Indian - the top strand with the painted bone are common in many souvenir shops in the west of China/Tibet - the other bone beads look a little more special and out of the ordinary (you certainly dont see them for sale around where we live - Chengdu - 2/3 days drive from the Tibetan border proper and a days drive from Sichuan Tibet). They often "age" bone beads by smoking/baking (I suspect in dung - which gives them a rather ripe smell) - so if your beads have a tinged look and the whiff of the bonfire - then they may not be too old.
The good thing about those malas is the turquoise - a few of those stones look nice.
As for being the genuine article - well most of the malas for sale in the antique shops have been made up from differnt bead sources - the good ones having a few old beads mixed with some new - but to find malas of beads where the beads have actually been used in Tibet can be a fools game (even in places like Lhasa),since this bead market has been drowned out by the Nepalese fake antique jewelry trade.
As for human bone - well there are lots of those skull bowls and arm/leg bone pipes to be found in a lot of antique shops - so there could well be human bone beads - but I haven't run across them.
My pics are of typical prayer beads type found in situ (one mala on a monk - the other from an antique shop) - usually the real thing seems not quite as spectacular as the offerings from Nepal - but they have a lot of character!!!
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