Hello
Necklaces like this are very familiar to me. I've had several
I tend to think they are Japanese not Chinese, and may have been made specially for tourists of the early C20th.
They include various types of large-holed beads, mostly spherical, including lacquer with or without inlays, large spherical stone beads, large well-made glass with crumbs, or swirls to suggest malachite or agate, beads with relief designs in sealing wax over terracotta either patterns or double masks, some metal beads resembling ojime, knobbly "Rudraksha" style nuts, carved Ivory or bone. The "Coral" twig-like shapes are stained bone. Sometimes these strings include glass spherical beads of yellow with pink rounds added to look like "Hornbill" beads.
98 is divisible by 7 and the intact strands I've handled usually have a seeming random layout but in fact the sequence has several repeats. Your stringing is almost certainly original.
In fact I have written about these beads several times before though maybe not on this board. Fred our Ojime specialist can give even more helpful details.
(More forthcoming when I find where that correspondence is.)
Stefany