The Jade Kingdom

By Paul E Desautels
Van Nostrand Reinhold Company Inc
1986 ISBN 0-442-21797-8

Van Nostrand Reinhold writes:

For more than 4000 years, jade has been a stone of legend and mystery, prized for its beauty and superiority as a hardstone carving material. The development of mineralogical and gemological knowledge of jade has been as fascinating as jade lore and history. Yet, until now, no book on jade has explored jade’s physical and chemical properties as well as the stone’s rich history. Instead, past literature has tended toward quick surveys of some of the more exotic carvings that have flowed, generation after generation, from the lapidary shops of China.

The Jade Kingdom is the first book to cover almost every aspect of jade—its occurrences worldwide, its mineralogy and geology, jade’s history, legend, and lore, the major cultures that have made use of it, and the techniques they have developed to master it. Specific areas covered include comparisons of true and false jades, the various methods of testing jade, from simple field tests to sophisticated laboratory analyses, and the known sources of jade, both ancient and modern.

The book also explores China’s centuries—old love of jade, discussing the origins and meanings of symbolic jade carvings as well as the clues to past Chinese culture, philosophy, and technology that are revealed by existing jade objects. The history of jade in the New World is surveyed as well, from the earliest Olmec times to the conquest of the Aztecs by Spanish adventurers. Other jade-using cultures covered in The Jade Kingdom include Europe, New Zealand, South-central Asia, India, Russia, and Japan. Dozens of photographs of nephrite and jadeite—the two main types of jade—as well as ancient and modern artifacts complete this handsome reference work.

Gemologists, collectors, anthropologists, archeologists, and jade dealers will welcome this first-time synthesis of new and old information about jade.

About the author
Paul E Desautels is the author of four other books—The Mineral Kingdom, The Gem Kingdom, Rocks and Minerals, and Gems in the Smithsonian—and has contributed many articles to such magazines as the Smithsonian, Mineralogical Record, Natural History, and American Mineralogist.