Ancient Chinese Jades
The exceptional quality and great breadth of the National Museum of Asian Art’s collections of ancient Chinese jades inspired this online catalogue. Its combination of museum and archaeological research with archival records and documentary images is designed to share knowledge and to encourage new study. This digital publication contains detailed catalogue entries for nearly one thousand jades and related carvings dating to the Neolithic period as well as the Shang 商 (ca. 1600–1050 BCE), Zhou 周 (ca. 1050–221 BCE), and Han 漢 (206 BCE–220 CE) dynasties. These richly illustrated entries are accompanied by a range of additional research resources. Among these resources are current findings, past opinions based upon earlier scholarship, information about object histories, and archival commercial records documenting the early twentieth–century collecting activities of our founder, Charles Lang Freer. We hope this information will advance international collaboration in a range of fields, including jade studies, historiography, provenance, and historical economics.
We pursued this digital publication platform because it allows for limitless image sharing, easy inclusion of pure and analytical documntation, and links to related objects in other collections and documented excavations. This online resource can readily expand over time to include new objects, information, and research. Most importantly it offers the opportunity for live engagement with archaeological practice in China today.
Individual entries reveal the evolving understanding of experts over the past century. Additional contents address what is known about the people involved in the discovery, sale, collection, and study of each piece. The information contained in the Objects, Places, and People divisions of the catalogue is supplemented with Essays, which provide broader contextualization, and Resources, which offer reference materials useful for research.
From the beginning, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation has promoted work on this project with generous financial support. We are extremely grateful for their sponsorship and encouragement as this work, first conceived as a print volume in 1997, evolved to become the present digital publication. Additional funding to help build the digital resource was provided by the Leon Levy Foundation.
Keith Wilson and Jingmin Zhang
National Museum of Asian Art
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