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Subject:Really need to listen, digest and learn!!!!
Posted By: Super Tue, Apr 22, 2014
Typical for Chinese nephrite? In what way?
There was NO confirmed nephrite ever being mined inside China. The major source of nephrite being used to "make" most of the archaic or antique Chinese jade carvings originated from Xinjiang, China, with best ones coming from Hetian, especially those collected from jade rivers. Xinjiang was never part of China during most of the Chinese dynasties due to consistent revolutions of the muslim people living there, it was not until Qing Emperor QianLong who had a reign of 61 years (actually much longer**)that he finally stopped the revolutions there and larger quantity of Hetian jade were being imported from Hetian to the Qing capital. That was one of the reasons why there were so many beautiful jade carving being made during the Qing dynasty. But even then, the supply of any raw Hetian jade were highly regulated by the Qing imperial government and were reserved mostly for the use of the emperor or those who had his permissions. Anybody who got caught with smuggling raw Hetian jade, like smugglers of salt, the penalty was DEATH (by chopping off their heads) some time not only the guilty parties, but their families or those who were nine times related to them. A pair of white Hetain jade bowls made during the QianLong reign, just material alone, cost 5,000 taels of silver. You can figure out how much that is in today's money.
There is no agreed upon standards in grading Hetian jade, they were mostly graded by their colors, with mutton-fat being the most sought after, white next, then white with green tint, celadon or green, yellow, black. But during my previous researches, truly YELLOW or BLACK Hetian jade are the rarest and very often deserve very high premiums. Lustrous celadon Hetian jade were also hard to find. As early as the late 1920s and early 1930s, beautiful and unique spinach jade were imported from Siberia, some of such material had these unique black spots/patches inside the material, were used to make some beautiful jade carvings. This was discussed in one of the jade books written by Professor S. Howard Hansford. I strongly recommend you to get some of his books and start reading before you will waste another dollar in buying any more jade carvings. Once a while, you can see a few pieces of these Siberian jade carving came on eBay, always attracted fierce competition and sold in thousands of dollars. In the 2008 Beijiang Olympic, nephrite jade that were mined in Qinghai (other side of Kunlun mountain) were being used to make some of the Olympic medals. Some left over material, some white, some yellowish white and some dark green nephrite jades were flooded the market for a short while and you could find some crude jade carvings made of this pretty good nephrite material. Some were listed for very high prices and some very reasonable. They are very decent nephrite.
For you to make a statement such as "You must have a very sharp eye since you can tell from a picture this is serpentine. Wow!"
reflects either your naive belief in that you can find something for nothing, like my Chinese friend who truly believe he has a Neolithic/Archaic jade collection he accumulated from eBay that is worth half a million US dollars and even published a book with them for sales on Amazon.
or that you mostly obtain your knowledge in jade from internet and never attempt to go a bit deeper to learn about what you love.
At one time, after being repeatedly ripped off by dishonest dealers who sold jade fakes, I had spent a lot of money and time in accumulating jade books (which are collectibles in their own sakes), spending hundreds of dollars on buying equipments for testing and studying jade carvings, jade rocks, jade slabs obtained from all over the world, and only after studying and testing more than 1,000 pieces of them, I started to develop some confidence in identifying the bad ones from the good ones. Of course, I can tell these beads were made of cheap serpentine. I had seen, tested and studied quite a few of them. Have you?
But with only low resolution pictures, your requests for others to appraise some of the pieces posted by you in this forum is truly a joke. No real jade experts will try to appraise any jade carvings free and with low resolution pictures only. Therefore, you always get what you are paying for, in this case, since our opinions are free, nothing.
Of course you definitely are entitled to your own opinions, but opinions based on information that were freely obtained from the internet or from jade pieces that were listed on eBay, should only be taken with a grain of salt. If you truly respect your hobby, then you should show respect to others and should not use 4-letter word in your title (like in here) or made sarcastic remarks, otherwise you will continue to pay far more tuition before you will finally learn the hard truth - that your whole jade collection is nothing but a heap of expensive junks, like some of those that were posted in this forum by you or by others. Now I am sorry if I may have hurt your feelings and you will probably challenge me to post some of my collections here. But that will be indeed the most naive and childish behavior any jade lovers will have when they could not agree with others.
One of the famous jade experts in the States, Mr. Sam Bernstein, once said in this forum:
"There is an old saying among jade collectors that if you ask 6 experts for an opinion, you'll get 12 opinions! Expertise is derived from direct personal experience over a prolonged period of time. Expertise in one field does not by itself guarantee expertise in another discipline. Gaining expertise requires hard work, study, reflection and confidence in one's ability and the integrity to admit there is always something new to be learned. Keeping an open, flexible mind and applying knowledge to a real world situation are important. Knowledge once painfully gained cannot be taken away from you.
Thank-you,
Sam Bernstein
S. Bernstein & Co. San Francisco"
That is indeed well said and should serve as a reminder for us jade lovers.
Super
** In an act of filial piety to ensure that he would not reign longer than his grandfather Kangxi, the Qianlong emperor retired on 8 February 1796—the last day of that year in the Chinese calendar—and took the title Emperor Emeritus.[48] However, he remained the ultimate authority until his death in 1799.
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