Victoria and Albert Museum Chinese jades: (E) (Victoria and Albert Museum Far Eastern series) - Tapa dura

Confucius (551-479 BC) praised jade as 'the embodiment of virtue'. Excavations in China since the 1970s have shed much light on the use and production of jade in neolithic and early dynastic periods. Excavated jade artefacts dating from the seventh to seventeenth centuries are rare, so it is particularly valuable that a number of specimens have been unearthed from tombs and pagoda foundations during the past two decades, thus allowing heirloom jades to be compared with these excavated examples and correctly dated. This book is a timely reassessment of what is known about Chinese jade, which has been a central element of Chinese material culture for an uninterrupted span of seven thousand years, and will appeal to collectors and newcomers to the subject alike.

Ming Wilson is Senior Curator in the Asian Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she is responsible for the collections of Chinese jades, carvings and graphic art. She is author of Rare Marks on Chinese Ceramics (School of Oriental and African Studies, 1998) and co-editor of Europe Studies China (Hanshan Tang Books, 1995) and Souvenir from Canton, Chinese Export Paintings from the V&A (Shanghai Classics Publishing, 2003).