"Jade Bureau" Prologue
Jade is the carrier of Chinese civilization. Jadeite, with its bright beauty as the "king of jade", and Hetian jade, with its gentleness as the "soul of soft jade", are both core materials for jade carving. However, they are easily confused due to differences in mineral nature and origin. Clarifying how to identify the two is the key to the inheritance of the jade carving industry.
The compilation of "Jade Bureau" stems from the industry's urgent need for professional identification knowledge. In the current market, chaos such as "Russian materials are used as Hotan materials" and "Jade jade jade is processed indiscriminately as high quality" are frequent. Many jade carvers mistakenly select inferior materials and misjudge their value due to insufficient ability to distinguish materials, which not only damages the creative results, but also affects the reputation of the industry. Positioned as "textbook-level professionalism", this book focuses on jadeite and Hetian jade, and builds a systematic and implementable identification system from the mineralogy essence to market practice.
The jadeite chapter goes deep into the core producing areas, analyzes the evaluation methods of "species, water, color, ground, and workmanship", and combines microscopic observation, refractive index testing and other means to dismantle the identification points such as "acid-etched net pattern of B goods" and "dyed sedimentation of C goods"; the Hotan jade chapter sorts out the differences in the composition of jade materials in Xinjiang, Russia, South Korea and other places, distinguishes categories through "cloud-like structure" and "density test", and provides visual cases for pain points such as "drug washing".
This book is also tied to the practice of jade carving, explaining the logic of designing jade according to the "water color" and Hetian jade using the "sugar color". It contains thousands of high-definition pictures and uses "positive and negative case comparisons" to help readers understand intuitively.
The art of jade carving begins with "identifying materials." I hope "Jade Bureau" will become a desk reference book for jade carvers, helping you accurately identify materials, preserve the authenticity of jade, and let Chinese jade culture rejuvenate in professional inheritance.
