Jade Necklaces

A landscape cut into a tablet of jade: a pavilion set among pines, with a bridge below and mountain peaks rising behind it.This is shanshui, the mountain-and-water scene Chinese painters have returned to for a thousand years. It is a picture of somewhere to...

A smooth trapezoid of pale jade, polished and left entirely plain. No carving, no engraving, just the stone and the light moving across it.Jade is kept close in Chinese homes for calm and steadiness, and an uncarved piece makes that its whole argument. The...

The smallest form the bi disc takes: a jade donut barely wider than a fingertip, on a chain fine enough to forget you have on.Jade has been kept close for calm and continuity for as long as people have carved it, and this is...

Two charms in one carving. The pixiu is the winged creature of Chinese myth with an appetite for gold and no way to pass it. It takes in and never lets out. The hulu gourd does the same for health and good fortune.Put together...

Red cord and jade is the oldest pairing in Chinese jewellery, the stone for steadiness and the thread for connection and luck. Nothing metal, nothing cold.Red is the colour worn at every threshold in Chinese life: new years, weddings, first days. Tied around jade,...

The hulu is a calabash gourd, dried and hollowed, once carried by physicians and wandering monks to hold medicine and water. Its narrow waist and round base gave it a second life as a feng shui charm.The shape is the meaning: a wide mouth...

The nine-tailed fox of Chinese folklore is a shapeshifter: clever, charming, never quite pinned down. Carved small in jade, curled with its tail around itself, it is more knowing than cute.The fox has long been a symbol of allure and sharp intelligence, the kind...

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

A full disc of pale green jade, engraved with the taijitu at its heart and the eight trigrams ringed around it. The engraving is fine enough to read up close and quiet enough to disappear at arm's length.Yin and yang are not opposites at...

The bagua is the oldest map in feng shui: eight trigrams set in a ring around the still point at the centre. Carved into jade, it becomes something you can carry rather than hang on a wall.Jade has been the stone of steadiness in...