Dear Chris,
I was tired of cloisonné by the time the tiny ones came out. So I did not handle them.
I started with the larger ones with dragons, fish and birds; these were available for about six months. And for me, cloisonné sold well for about a year. Then -as the Chinese are prone to do- the market became flooded with floral pattern cloisonné beads. I had long stopped handling them by the time the American wholesale price dropped from five dollars to fifty cents each. Collecting contemporary cloisonné quickly became redundant.
Just Fred
Kathleen's fish, bat, lotus, and blossom beads.
Although round, they seem very similar to the oval beads pictured in Arthur & Grace Chu's 1975 book Oriental Cloisonne and Other Enamels, so presumably are from the early 1970s?
Recently had some correspondence from someone who fled from Shanghai to Taiwan in 1950, sold cloisonne and porcelain there for 10 years before moving to the U.S.
He relates:
"As I remember Taiwan made a lot of cloisonne beads about 30+ years ago. At that time Taiwan cloisonne makers invented a simple machine to polish the beads. They can polish many beads in one time by using 2 iron disc with many holes, one on top and one on bottom, the hole size is the same as beads, using motor to polish them. The machine polish makes beautiful beads."
30 years ago is the 1980s, of course.
The Beijing cloisonne beads that seem older show evidence of hand polishing on the same sort of electric machine the workshops use to polish vases, bottles, etc. It used to be done on a foot-pedaled wooden frame. At any rate, the machine spins the piece against the abrasives held in hand or on sticks. So it leaves parallel polishing rings, like the lines of latitude on globe. Another chapter in the long and harrowing saga of piecework?
