Jade Necklaces

A pavilion among pines, carved into a tablet of jade.This is shanshui, the mountain-and-water landscape Chinese painters have returned to for a thousand years: somewhere high, quiet and far from the city, kept as a picture of where you would go if you could....

A smooth tablet of pale jade, left uncarved.No engraving, no symbol, just the stone and the light moving across it. Jade is kept close in Chinese homes for calm and continuity, and an uncarved piece makes that its whole argument. The cloudiness inside is...

A jade donut barely wider than a fingertip.This is the bi disc reduced to its smallest form, the open centre still carrying the old meaning of a clear path. It is the piece for someone who wants jade on every day rather than for...

Two charms in one carving: the pixiu, and the hulu gourd beneath it.The pixiu is the winged creature of Chinese myth with an appetite for gold and no way to pass it, so what it takes in, it keeps. The hulu does the same...

Jade on a hand-tied red cord. Nothing metal.Red cord and jade is the oldest pairing in Chinese jewellery, the stone for steadiness and the thread for connection and luck. Red is the colour worn at every threshold in Chinese life, at new years, weddings,...

A jade gourd, narrow at the waist and round at the base.The hulu is a calabash, dried and hollowed, once carried by physicians and wandering monks to hold medicine and water. Its shape became its meaning: a wide mouth that draws things in, a...

A small jade fox, curled with its tail around itself.The nine-tailed fox of Chinese folklore is a shapeshifter, clever and charming and never quite pinned down, kept as a charm for allure and for the sharp kind of intelligence that reads a room before...

A ring of jade with an open centre.The bi disc is one of the oldest forms in Chinese jade, carved and buried with the dead for four thousand years before anyone thought to wear one. The hole at its middle stands for heaven, and...

A full disc of pale jade, taijitu at the centre.Yin and yang are not opposites at war. They are two halves that need each other, each carrying a seed of the other, and the eight trigrams around them are the eight ways that balance...

A jade disc carved with the eight trigrams.The bagua is the map feng shui works from, eight trigrams ringed around a still centre, and it usually hangs above a door to settle a room. Carved small in jade it does the same job at...