Hi,

IMHO its Cambodian bead. Many of them popup in JJ Market (BKK) in 2005-2007, with and without gold ends, but then they all disapear. My guess some of them made it to China

Rgrds

Nice to hear from you again, R.M. - you always post such interesting things.

While I know nothing about ancient stone beads, the contrasts between these two pieces would make me keep them together as a pair - very yin/yang, don't you think?

Taoism...Man and woman,black and white ...
yin and yang ...

Hi RM,

It's very good to see you here again. These are two very nice early pieces.

The agate bead reminded me at once of a jade bead from Ban Chiang in Thailand that I've shown here before. It's almost the same length as yours (10.2 cm) made of a dark green almost black jade (pictures attached here). It might have been made in Phung Nguyen in northern Vietnam and is quite early, dating from around 2,000BCE. Your bead is a beautiful dark stone also, and it could be from Vietnam too, but from further south and probably later - say, 300BCE to 400CE. From the placing of them in graves we know that these long tubular beads must have been worn high up on the throat.

At first your rock crystal penannular slit ring made me think of two ear ornaments from Vietnam, one jade, one crystal, that date from the Dong Son period, late first millennium BCE. But as I compare them the form of yours is rather different. The Dong Son rings are quite sharply cut on the inside with a bevelled slope on the exterior. I'll attach images of them to the next post.

Then I remembered a stone slit ring I got quite a long time ago in Guangzhou. I was told it was from the south and from the Warring States period, which would fit with what you say about yours. It's closer in form to yours, too, with a bevelled slope on the inside and a rounded exterior.

It's interesting that these rings which are found at the same time in a number of different places can vary in their details depending on the specific culture that produced them.

All the best,

Will

It's just on 5 cm across. I'm not sure what the stone is, but it feels and looks a bit like chalcedony??

Hi Will
the slit ring you show I am sure is made of chalcedony and is earlier than Warring States actually it is from early bronze time in northeast china, but they are of great amount in different shapes and all of the same material.

the attachment is my collection of chalcedony staff of the same time and all are from northeast china.
one unfinished slit ring

I have looked and looked for information on the Chalcedony Quail image attached. I purchased this in a consignment antique store near Beijing in 2001. It measures 4.38 inches high by 4.75 inches wide by 1.60 inches thick.

The chalcedony which you describe as coming from NE China closely resembles the chalcedony used in my carving. Do you have any idea on how to definitively locate the source and era of the particular type of chalcedony?

Thank you for your input!

Hi Will
How do you do?
I got depression so I leave for some time without doing anything.
Thanks very much for your reply!

When talking about tubular beads from east asia, it is really a great topic.Early tubular beads could be found from north korea(one of my early posts on this forum is about tubulor beads from that region)to south vietnam from different period of time and different kind of material.

The first attachment is from "Jadeware from East asia" a very good book on early jadeware published in taiwan china. But there is no provenance about these beautiful beads made of as you said a dark green almost black jade.During the 1990s the economic condition in taiwan was on its top so the dealers and collectors were very active and many ancient antiques especially jadeware from other places of asia flowed into taiwan.so I think these beads were bought during that time from some place like south china or south asia countries.
they are very much like your bead isn't it? though maybe becouse of the photograph I can not see very clearly the material of your bead I am sure it is very old.

In 2001 a great early Shang(before 1000BCE) relic was found and scientific excavated in near chengdu city sichuan province southwest china. Many wonderful jade and stone and bronze and gold come out.
The attached pic is the jade beads from Jinsha relic, I can not find any more pics from different angle about the details of these beads.
But I personally think if they are not the same they must be close relatives with those in taiwan as shown above.

I agree your judgement on the long agate bead.
Since it got 2 circles and it is obviously made by design.
I think it not a single case.
(If it is Dong son bead? I searched on the net...)
I have seen similar ones like this with 2 or 1 designed circles, but just not this long.
I have no idea about agate beads from thailand or vietnam or other south asian countries but it is interesting and true that in china's south east coast cities alien agate beads (see the attachment) were imported during the Han (20 BCE) dynasty.

Hi Will
I think I did not take the pics clear enough so it seems leading you to a wrong judgement.
There IS a bevelled slope on the exterior of the crystal Jue, maybe you can see it from this pic and the slope only exists on one side.
the man from whom I got the crystal jue has about more than 20 jade jue with one side slope as same as the jade one you show. I strongly guess they are from vietnam or some place near the boarder with china.
but we did find the same kind of jue in tombs of west Han period in south china.

I think my crystal one is from the same culture since they all has a bevelled slope on one side.
I can not explain if you said yours is quite sharply cut on the inside while mine seems to be more rough on the inside, maybe they were made in different places ? or times? or maybe both situations exist.

I will check the report later ...

R.M.

Hi Will
I think I did not take the pics clear enough so it seems leading you to a wrong judgement.
There IS a bevelled slope on the exterior of the crystal Jue, maybe you can see it from this pic and the slope only exists on one side.
the man from whom I got the crystal jue has about more than 20 jade jue with one side slope as same as the jade one you show. I strongly guess they are from vietnam or some place near the boarder with china.
but we did find the same kind of jue in tombs of west Han period in south china.

I think my crystal one is from the same culture since they all has a bevelled slope on one side.
I can not explain if you said yours is quite sharply cut on the inside while mine seems to be more rough on the inside, maybe they were made in different places ? or times? or maybe both situations exist.

I will check the report later ...

R.M.

Hi RM,

I'm sorry to hear you've been ill and hope you're feeling much better again now.

Thanks for all the additional information. It's very interesting. It's good especially to know about the chalcedony ring, since I've always associated slit rings with southern China and Southeast Asia. Do you know more about the sites where they are found in the north, and have any production sites been discovered?

Again, the tubular beads from Jinsha, which I hadn't seen before, are very similar to the ones from Ban Chiang and Phung Nguyen. They seem to have the same slanted ends that the early (second millennium BCE) Southeast Asian beads invariably have. Later tubes tend to be less carefully made and are sometimes square-cut at the ends. The most prolific time for agate beads in southern Vietnam was the Funan (Phnom) kingdom and it probably continued into Cham and pre-Angkor periods. Some of the agate was imported from India, but it's now known that much of it was locally mined and worked.

I think the only difference between your crystal ring and mine is that the inside of mine is square cut (as with all Dong Son slit rings) whereas yours appears to be rounded at the edge. I'm not sure if the difference is meaningful or not.

All the best,

Will

Thanks for another interesting thread.
As one of the great uninitiated into this realm of stone beads I succumbed to an beautiful black hard-stone tube bead in Thailand last summer.
It resembles your bead and as the story goes it came from Tsakli, a couple hours north of Bangkok.. Now I see this variety of bead came from a wide area, cultural periods and accurate identification can be difficult.
Assuming this was found in Thailand would it have been manufactured there and what period would it likely be? Length: 5 3/4"

Thanks // bb

Hi Bob,

That's a beautiful bead and really long - nearly 15 cm. Wow! I don't recognise the name Tsakli as being that of any Neolithic or Bronze Age site in the region, but 2 hours north of Bangkok (allowing for traffic jams!) would take one to Lopburi and there are several sites around there where tubular beads like this are occasionally found. More typical would be the smaller hardstone beads that have a double function as beads and ear ornaments (see the attached photo).

A lot of the long nephrite (and sometimes serpentine) tubes are found in the Ban Chiang area, but the only place where evidence of manufacture has so far been uncovered is at the Phung Nguyen site of Trang Kenh on the coast at the mouth of the Red River estuary east of Hanoi. The Vietnamese archaeologist Nguyen Kim Dung made the discovery in the late 80s and I've seen the massive quantities of beautifully worked hardstone bangles, rings, beads and ceremonial adzes that were recovered there and which show the various stages in the process of production.

For the moment, I'm inclined to believe that all these tubular beads from that region and period (early 2nd millennium BCE) were made in northern Vietnam, but many of my Thai friends would disagree vehemently.

(Incidentally, a word of warning to anyone reading this: the English-language Wikipedia entries for Vietnamese prehistoric cultures are frequently wrong. I don't know why, and I've given up trying to correct factual mistakes in Wikipedia; it can become a full-time job!)

Cheers,

Will

The level of expertise on this message board is humbling.

Thanks once again for the excellent commentary by the posters here.

Good luck & bead wishes!

ps; My mistake Will - I confused my Tibetan with my Thai trip?
We spent Sangkran in Takhli last April, just north of Singburi (the famous Snakehead Fish place).

Hello Red Mountain, I'm very glad to see you back.

First photo: jade ring with ancient holes to repair (string together) old
break; 11.5 cm long tubular beads, jade square earring, very thin (Pyu?)
8 cm x 1cm x .4cm rectangular jade bead, slit ring

Second photo: All of the slit rings, including the large glass pair are
beveled on one side and rounded or flat on the other side.

Terry

Any aid with precise identification of culture, era etc. will be appreciated. I have some books on early stone artifacts in Southeast Asia,
but they do not necessarily agree as to attribution.

Hi Cicada
what should I say...

do you want to sell them to me?

R.M.

Hi cicada

Dont know if you have seen these books which might help:

Burnished Beauty the art of stone in early SEA by Christopher Frape.

Ancient hardstone earrings of Vietnam by Christopher Frape. Arts of Asia sept-oct 1997.

Early Chinese Stone and Circular Art by Chad Herrington.

The pieces you show are wonderful.

Sallie

Hi Sallie,

I'm glad to see that you are still here. Thanks for the list. I do have the two books you suggest. I will look for the article. The pieces shown in those books would convert anyone into a lover of stones.

Terry

Hi Terry,

I'd be interested in knowing what the dealer(s) said about them. Really, any information you have would be useful.

Essentially, all these pieces could possibly be from Vietnam.

The stone slit rings are Dong Son, I think - similar to the one I posted earlier. The glass slit rings are from the Sa Huynh culture further south in Vietnam - about 2,000 years old. The squarish little slit ring is from the Dong Dau culture that bridged the gap between Phung Nguyen and Dong Son (1500BCE-700 or thereabouts). It's very pretty and quite rare. I'll attach a page from a Vietnamese archaeology journal where you can just about see a similar one at #4. With the spiked protuberances, it's a design that evolved through different cultures, culminating in Sa Huynh ear ornaments like the one attached.

I don't remember having seen a long flat rectangular bead like the one you picture; it doesn't look Tircul (Pyu) to me but I could easily be wrong.

The tubular beads could be from Phung Nguyen, but they look a little less well rounded than I would expect from there and I think they're probably later. Very similar beads were manufactured over a period of nearly 1,500 years not only in Vietnam and possibly Thailand, but also in western China (as Red Mountain showed us) and in the Philippines and Taiwan. In the first millennium BCE, as nephrite deposits in Vietnam started to run out a remarkable long-distance maritime trade began to develop between Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines that saw the exchange not only of raw Taiwanese jade but also of finished and partially finished artefacts.

There are also recent fakes of these tubular beads so one has to be careful; it's a good sign if they still retain their patina.

I hope this helps to fill in some of the gaps.

Best,

Will

Here are a couple of examples of the kinds of repairs that might have been done on your jade ring in ancient times. These are both from Ban Chiang in north-eastern Thailand. The bangles are about 3,000 years old, the repairs 2,000 - which gives one an idea of how long these treasured pieces were used.

Will

These repairs are more lavish than I had imagined. I hadn't seen these.
Thanks Will for this and for other information above. I'm still looking for my receipt on one of the pieces which I bought long ago.

Great to see you back, thank you always for the fine educational posts.

Thank you all for this wonderful and interesting thread. I would like to show you some of my bracelets from Myanmar. All info is welcome.
Size of the round one is 79mm, the other is 66 x 59mm.

Hendrik

Hi Hendrik,

This discussion had made me think of some of the lovely things you've shown here in the past, and I was hoping it would entice you to show more of them. These two are really fine and the second one especially is quite rare in this condition. I never know how to describe its strange shape - sort of oval or a rounded triangle, I guess. There are a lot of variants on this shape and generally they seem to be found in an area of northern Burma around Mandalay - sometimes further north, but not much in the south. Dating is still pretty tentative for early Burmese artefacts, but bangles like these, sometimes as large as 20+centimetres in length, seem to have been produced in a pre-Samon Valley period from about 1,000 BCE to 300 BCE. I wouldn't be surprised if these dates were pushed back to an earlier time frame by future finds. Round bangles like your first example, with an interior lip, are found much more widely in SE Asia, and in southern Burma as well as the north. Thanks for showing them.

Cheers,

Will

Thank you Will, it's my pleasure. The biggest bracelet I have is 145 x 108mm and 15mm thick in the middle by the opening. It is pretty heavy and really beautiful when you can catch the sunlight in it. I'll try to make another picture later.

Hendrik

What caused the markings on this, that look like braided cord [upper left side] or something woven [lower middle]?

I suppose that what you see are traces of woven fabric.

Hendrik

Ancient grave goods in East and Southeast Asia were sometimes wrapped in cloth before they were buried. I have a Neolithic calcified jade bi from North China that has the marks of a cloth wrapping deeply impressed in the stone. I don't have photos of that but here is one of a bronze bowl from southern Vietnam that is about 2000 years old. So far it hasn't proved possible to discover what the material was; probably cotton, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of it being some kind of silk, either imported or locally produced.

I think this practice tells us something about the value that the living placed on the items that they buried with their dead.

will

This shows the details of the weave.

Light shining through the rim of the big bangle. Isn't this cool?

... mysterious. One can see why early people valued this translucent stone so much. The smaller bangle must glow like this as well. Thanks again for showing them.

W

This pendant/bead - sold as Pyu - is wonderfully shaped and rounded. There
is an incised line on one face. It is probably upside down in these photos as it would hang in the opposite direction. The seller called it a fish, which is possible, but not definitive. It is 55mm x approx. 19mm.

This ring is made from a very white quartz-like stone, as could be seen if you could view the interior from fresh break.
First mishap: It was once intact, but broke within the last year when my
cat jumped onto an almost always cleared surface of a chest to look out of the window. A box containing many interesting pieces was upset and fell to the floor. This ring was one of the casualties - see photo. When
pieces are placed together, one can hardly see the break line. (A perhaps
more serious casualty was the breaking of two out of three long Chinese
rock crystal cylinder beads which are identified in the timeline as Liao, but which I have also seen identified as Warring States by a different source. Unfortunately the third cylinder was slightly chipped at one end. This could be a topic for a thread: bead accidents - it could be cautionary and a source of consolation at the same time.)

Second mishap: I was certain that I had seen an almost identical piece in one of the books on South East Asian stone art recommended by Sallie, but now that I have looked there and elsewhere, I cannot find it and I wonder if I imagined it.

... but I have some doubts about both of them.

The fish (?) bead doesn't look Tircul (or Pyu) to me, I'm afraid. All the Samon Valley and Tircul animal beads I've seen (including the rare fish-shaped beads) are much more recognisable and precise in their depictions.

The slit ring is really puzzling. I haven't seen anything like it in situ or in any publications from Southeast Asia, but there are always new finds emerging. Though the circle motif doesn't appear on early jewellery from this area it is very common on Dong Son bronzes and on the earthenware pottery that is found at Mon/Dvaravati sites in Thailand, so I wouldn't want to rule the possibility out. It comes down to how sure you are about the provenance, I think.

I'm really sorry about the mishap. These accidents happen so quickly and seem so irreversible. But I love repaired things, and giving something an interesting or beautiful repair is a bit like giving it a new life.

Best,

Will