You were sold a group of imitations, along with a story that is fabricated.

These are plastic reproductions of zi beads, and they are among the most-recent editions of that stuff. It is virtually impossible that these were "made in the 1970s." I can show the plastic beads circulating from that time.

The seller's ploy, "Indo-Tibetan" is also a recent wrinkle in ways to get people to buy beads. One never heard this five or ten years ago.

Chinese agate reproduction zi first appeared in 1993. I own the first bead to come to the USA that year. And I have several beads from this first wave of production; and various reproduction zi I have bought since then. View my FaceBook page to see the considerable number of zi beads I bought between 2016 and 2018.

By the way, although there are several ways to spell "zi" (including gzi, gZi, GZI, dzi, dZi, DZI, Zi, and ZI), you would not spell is "Dzi." If you wanted to capitalize the name it would be "DZi." But no one uses that. It is easier and just as accurate to spell it "zi."

The link shown here encompasses Forum posts from 2005 to 2008, where zi beads are mentioned. To read chronologically, begin at the bottom and work your way through each main topic. (Main topics are indicated where the post says "View All"—which you can use to read every reply to the dialogue.). You will pass through some posts that do not relate to zi beads. But using the Search function here is the best way to see the copious number of posts that may have asked questions that are similar to your questions.

The best advice I can give you is to join my Yahoo Zi Group, and read my article from Arts of Asia, 2002. It is posted at the Group and can be downloaded for personal use. You will find a link to the Zi Group in one of the dialogues from the link here.

Good luck. Jamey

http://beadcollector.net/cgi-bin/anyboard.cgi?fvp=%2Fopenforum%2F&tK=zi+beadman&wT=1&yVz=yTz&aO=1&hIz=50000&hJz=4000&cmd=find&by=&xcfgfs=tK-wT-yVz-aO-hKz