414 JADE. 



festivals, and which arc shaped so as to receive the meats. There is 

 mention made of these vessels in "The Two Educated Girls," where the 

 author of this pretty romance gives a descrii^tion of an imperial ban- 

 quet: "At the end of some instants the music of the dragon and the 

 I)hcenis is heard, and at once is served in vases of jade the most refined 

 meats." 



Some of these vessels are of very large dimensions. A poem of 

 Pei-y-tchi, entitled "The Measures of Jade," makes mention of two vases, 

 broken by Fan-tseng, each of which would contain a teou,that is to say, 

 large enough to contain one million two hundred thousand grains of 

 millet, which is a capacity certainly very uncommon. Pei-y-tchi thus 

 expresses his indignation : " In his time no good counsel was listened 

 to ; what apology did Fan-tseng make for these great vessels of jade ? 

 . . . . His brilliant polished blade leaped from its scabbard pure 

 as water, brilliant as an icicle, and the transparent pieces of the pre- 

 cious stone flew round like flashes of light." 



To conclude our statements as to the rare skill of the orientals in the 

 difficult art of working in jade, we quote a passage from the Notices of 

 Khotan: "In the first year Kian-tchong of the reign of Te-tsoung, 

 (780,) one of the officers of the palace, named Tchou-jou-yu, was sent 

 into the country of Yu-thian to seek for the stone yu. He succeeded in 

 obtaining a tablet, five clasps, a magnetic ear-ornament, three hundred 

 small pieces for girdles, forty hair-pins or skewers, thirty boxes, ten 

 bracelets, three rods, and a hundred pounds of uncut masses." He 

 loaded this precious freight on camels and returned ; but, being de- 

 reived by false information, he took the wrong road, and was plun- 

 dered by Hoei-he. A little while afterward all the abovementioned 

 objects came on the market. 



Of all the works of art, the most interesting, beyond all question, are 

 the jade figures affixed to the magnetic chariots, which were invented, 

 according to the historians of the Chinese Empire, by the Emperor 

 Hoang-ti, 2637 years before our era. A valuable work on Chinese an- 

 tiquities, in twenty -four volumes, entitled Poh-kou-thon, or illustrated 

 descriptions of antiquities, preserved in the private collections of Chi- 

 nese amateurs, contains, in the part Kou-yu-thou, which is entirely occu- 

 pied with works in jade, some fifty objects, among which we may dis- 

 tinguish the figure of a personage which the Chinese editors refer back 

 to the dynasty of Chang, from 1783 to 1134 before Christ. The figure 

 represents the man of the magnetic chariot elevated in the front of the 

 car, pointing with extended finger to the south (Tchi-nan-kiu) and sculp- 

 tured out of yu or jade. The man, turning on a pivot, extends his right 

 hand in the direction of the south, or that point of the compass oppo- 

 site to the north magnetic pole. It is important to have concealed in 

 the figure a strong magnet, which always points to the north, and the 

 man's arm is thus directed to the south, which is the sacred aspect of the 

 heavens among the Chinese. 



