io Introduction. 



If it is too much to say that the whole work is a fraud, I quite agree 

 with this criticism in that it contains a great deal of purely fictitious 

 matter. Fictitious are, in my opinion, all the ancient inscriptions 

 alleged to be inscribed on the jades which have never existed in ancient 

 times and are simply the invention of the T'ang or Sung periods. 1 

 Even Dr. Bushell, who evinces confidence in this work, admits that 

 there are many tablets figured in it which have little pretension to the 

 great antiquity assigned to them, and that some of the inscriptions are 

 evidently copied from pieces of ancient bronze figured in archaeological 

 books, and that, in fact, many of the specimens in the later parts of 

 the collection seem to be derived from a similar source — the fountain- 

 head of almost all Chinese decorative art. 



It is also suspicious that many pieces, e. g., all the tablets of rank in 

 the first chapter ascribed to the Hia dynasty, have been inscribed on 

 the back as having belonged to the T'ang and Southern T'ang dynasties. 



The work opens with two oblong jade tablets ascribed to the myth- 

 ical emperor Yu from the supposed resemblance of the two undeciphered 

 characters on the upper side with the so-called tadpole characters on 

 the alleged inscription of Yii (Kou lou pei). On the back, we find an 

 inscription reading "Dark-colored tablet (kuei) of Yu the sovereign 

 who regulated the waters. Collection of the Imperial Treasury of 

 the period K'ai yuan (713-741 a. d.) of the Great T'ang dynasty." 

 The Sung authors tell us that these two pieces came to light in the 

 period Chih ho (1054-55), in the river Ts'i when its waters were dried 

 up, and that these were both found inside of large bronze kettles 

 {ting) each weighing over a hundred catties; the walls of these 

 urns were covered with inscriptions identical in character with 

 those on the tablets. The Sung authors suppose that they had been 

 thrown into the river during the T'ang dynasty as an offering to the 

 river-god, to restore the river to normal conditions. But would genuine 

 relics of the Hia dynasty have been used for this purpose? It seems 

 rather plausible that these two alleged tablets of Yu were fabricated 

 at the time of the T'ang dynasty, possibly with the idea of serving as 

 offerings to a river-god. 2 The name of Yu as the ruler of water was 



inscriptions, particularly those containing dates, on jade pieces are suspicious 

 in any case. In the best archaeological collection of jades, that of Wu Ta-ch'eng 

 (see below), there is among two hundred and fifteen ancient pieces, not one inscribed, 

 nor is there one in my collection. A few pieces in the Bishop collection with alleged 

 Han inscriptions are, for this and also for other reasons, highly suspicious. The 

 dating of jade objects became a fashion only in the K'ien-lung period. 



2 Also Wu Ta-ch'£ng (see below under 5) states in the preface of his work that 

 under the T'ang and Sung many imitations of jade objects were made which can 

 hardly be distinguished from the ancient genuine ones. The same author's judg- 

 ment on the Ku yu t'u p'u is: "Its drawback consists in the indiscriminate choice 

 of a confused mass of objects, nor does it betray intelligence." 



