| Original Message: Promyshlenniki made it to Alaska for the furs long before the English? |
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And had already established a trade of sorts with the Chinese at Kyakhta. But whether the Chinese actually had glass beads to sell at Kyakhta I don't know enough about the trade history of the 17th and 18th century Kangxi and Qianlong emperors to even speculate. The Treaty of Nerchinsk was 1689. Here's the Met Museum on the imperial Qing glass workshop: A new chapter in the history of Chinese glassmaking began in i696, the thirty-fifth year of the reign of Kangxi, when a glass factory was established within the imperial city in Beijing under the direction of the Jesuit missionary Kilian Stumpf (i6gg-I720). The type of glass produced there, of which this vase is an example, was subsequently known in the West as Peking glass. Craftsmen were recruited from Boshan, the traditional center of glassmaking in China, and from Guangzhou (Canton). The workshop's peak period, in both quantity and quality of its wares, was between 1740 and 1760, in the early reign of the Qianlong emperor. Palace records show that Jesuits with expertise in certain Western glassmaking techniques were active in the workshop at this time. After 1760, glass production in the palace workshop declined rapidly, as did the quality of the wares. This was also true of other workshops producing decorative arts for the palace-a result of the emptying of the imperial coffers. As to materials analysis of the Chinese glass: "In the late period (i4th century and after), potash-lime glass continued to be produced, along with potash-lead glass. During the eighteenth century, soda-lime glass became quite common, with a chemical composition similar to that of contemporaneous European glass. [bolding mine] It is likely that this type of glass was introduced by Jesuits at the imperial workshop in Beijing." https://www.metmuseum.org/pubs/bulletins/1/pdf/3269166.pdf.bannered.pdf All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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