| Original Message: Chinese Qing dynasty necklace |
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Hi everyone, I bought this Chinese necklace for next to nothing on eBay a while back, but I just got round to taking some pictures of it yesterday. I understand why nobody else was interested in it, because it’s in quite poor condition – the silk tassels seem to disintegrate as I breathe on it – but in fact there are some very interesting things on it, I think. It’s Qing dynasty, eighteenth or nineteenth century, I would guess, and presumably a “court necklace.” Not for the imperial court in Beijing, but perhaps for a provincial vice-regal court, or even for official occasions at a magistrate’s residence in a regional city. There are 98 beads on it now, and 98 is quite an auspicious number in itself, but I imagine there may possibly have been ten more on a subsidiary strand to make up the 108 required for a Buddhist prayer necklace. There’s a wide variety of different materials; wound moochrome glass in different colours and qualities; larger yellow crumb beads; seeds and pits, both simulated and real, carved and in their natural state; wood; coral; and lacquer. It’s the lacquer really that interests me most since there’s virtually no mention of lacquer beads in any of the obvious books (Francis, Liu, Dubin, Lankton), or here in previous posts on this forum – which surprises me, since it’s a material that was used for so many purposes in China, Japan, Burma and Vietnam. Here there are two kinds of lacquer beads: nine two-faced beads, in both red lacquer and yellow, with a Buddha on one side and a demon on the other; and five with a scroll pattern which derives originally from archaic bronze. This deeply-carved scroll pattern was very popular in Yuan and Ming times, and that makes me wonder if these beads might date from quite early in the Qing dynasty, perhaps even the late seventeenth century. The most likely way of getting a fix on the date would be if there were any definite date for the crumb beads. I’ve never heard of these before the nineteenth century, and I haven’t yet read Yang Boda’s writing on Qing glass, but from the rest of his writing that I know, I doubt if he’s much interested in beads, anyway. Some of the face beads are damaged, and one can see how the lacquer has been applied over a drilled wood core; I would guess that such a thickness of wood has prevented the lacquer from “breathing” properly – which might explain why it has chipped so much. Actually, I’m not sure about some of the organic materials here. People in the Qing period valued simulated materials highly, sometimes more highly than the originals they were imitating, and some of the pits and wood beads may actually be lacquer also. I know nothing about coral, I’m afraid, and it even occurs to me that some of the coral beads may possibly be dyed bone?? Sorry that some of the pictures show a lot of dust; it’s all so fragile, I’m afraid to do much cleaning (excuses, excuses – I never clean anything!) Will All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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