Jade Past and Present
Tins investigation into the technique and progress of jade-carving in China and elsewhere is based on painstaking documentation and conforms to the exacting standards of modern scholarship. Pioneers in the field, Bushell and Laufer, were by no means discriminating in their use of Chinese material, and later writers, having to deal with objects the dating and provenance of which were often un- certain, usually fell back on purely subjective aesthetic observations. At worst such writing is mere literary preciosity, and at best it fails to take into account what after all are essential aids to art-apprecia- tion—the social and historical circumstances that call an art into being, and the technical resources available to its exponents.
Mr. Hansford, who is Lecturer in Chinese Art and Archaeology at the Courtauld Institute of Art, has two advantages in dealing with his subject ; in combination, they are probably unique among Western students of Chinese jade. He is a scholar of Chinese, and can therefore make use of native texts and appraise their relative reliability ; and he has personally watched the modus operandi of the craft in the workshops of Peking. His most valuable findings concern the sources of supply of jade, methods of jade-carving and the progress of the craft in China. He concludes that evidence points to Chinese Turkestan as the main source of supply of Chinese jade through history, and the probable place of origin of the craft in neolithic times. This tends to support theoriet of a cultural invasion throughout North-West China to the Yellow River valley, an invasion perhaps associated with the painted pottery of South Kan-su and West Honan. now thought to date from around 2,000 B.c.
Jade-carving could perhaps be called the neolithic art par excellence, in so far as this intractable material, harder than any metal, can only be cut by means of abrasive pastes of stones harder than itself. Comparison with techniques employed by other jade- workers—for example, the Maoris of New Zealand—enables the author to discover the stages by which technical mastery of the craft was achieved in China, while the results of his own experiments suggest the startling conclusion that the primitive drill was nothing more thin a bamboo tube, and that this tool probably survived well into the Bronze Age, at least for the drilling of larger holes.
Mr. Hansford discusses theories concerning the possible purpose of certain well-known types of ancient ritual jades, and then follows the stylistic evolution of jade-carving from antiquity through to the present. His thirty-two half-tone plates and coloured frontispiece are well-chosen illustrations of his thesis, and especially interesting are the photographs he took showing stages in the manufacture of jade articles in Peking today. Although this book will, recommend itself tO students and collectors of Chinese art as the first major advance in the field for nearly forty years, its material is easily assimilable by a wider public, and should prove a most enjoyable introduction to this fascinating craft W. Y. WILLETTS.
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