Exquisite jade discs and rings help illustrate how ancient Chinese civilizations learned to shape intractable natural resources, and in doing so, developed a thriving culture that still resonates today, Zhao Xu reports.

If there's one type of item that embodies the ancient Chinese jade story, it could well be jue, known to Western researchers as a "slit ring". The circular jadeware item features a slim opening that runs from its outer edge, across the radius, to its holed center. Believed to be an ear adornment, the oldest, dated to some 9,200 years ago, were found at a Neolithic site dubbed "the cradle of the Chinese jade culture".

Measuring 400,000 square meters, the site, known as Xiaonanshan (Little Southern Mountain), is located in the far northeastern tip of the country, on the western bank of the Ussuri River overlooking Russia. There, along with the jade slit rings, archaeologists have unearthed more than 200 pieces of jadeware, including discs, tubes and flat beads, all similarly aged.

"The discovery has helped to make Northeast Asia the place where evidence of the world's earliest jade usage is found," says Zuo Jun from the prestigious Nanjing Museum, where he was curator to a grand exhibition tracing the entire trajectory of China's jade history. "This is no coincidence: Stonework was highly developed in that region during the early stage of the Neolithic Age. And we have every reason to believe that people who were experts with stones were also good at looking for, and working with, the more beautiful ones."
And they were very, very choosy, says Zuo. "Being beautiful was not the only criteria — our ancestors were looking for a specific type of stone with a soft shine, one that modern-day geologists call 'nephrite'."

A silicate of calcium and magnesium, nephrite is not a mineral species, but rather a mineral aggregate formed by tightly interlocking microscopic crystals. This chemical structure has given the stone a sturdiness second only to that of black diamond, a remarkable trait from which metaphors of unbreakability and tenacity would be extracted some 7,000 years later.

Yet, none of the interpretations would be possible without the tenacious and ingenious efforts of those who were behind the jade discs and slit rings of Xiaonanshan. By finding ways to work the most "intractable" stone into primitive pieces of art, they had helped to not only bring out its sheen, but uncovered a charm that would hold eternal appeal for those who came after them.

"In no other region of the world has this material been worked with such skill in such a long and unbroken tradition," says Zuo. "From the very beginning, there was the realization that to fully tap into the potential of nephrite jade, one must give up the approach long adopted for the making of stone tools."
Since the Paleolithic period, stone tools had been made from rocks such as flint, shale and obsidian. All three, while dry, are very brittle, allowing stone flakes to be produced with repeated pounding. These flakes, sharp around the edges, made for ideal cutting tools.

Nephrite jade is different in that its unusual obdurateness forbids the easy separation of one part from the rest by means of chipping. Besides, it was simply too precious to be treated in a haphazard manner, which would almost certainly cause huge waste and would never be able to produce the delicate shapes intended for the material by its handlers.

String saw — that was the answer to the problem from the jade artisans of Xiaonanshan. Chunks of jade were sliced apart as the string, sturdy enough to sustain the repeated friction, was pulled back and forth against the jade's surface until it started to sink, deeper and deeper, into the material. More than that, the technique proved very effective when it came to achieving precise and minute control over the shaping of the material — traces of string sawing, visible as a series of curved undulations, can be found in the slits of the Xiaonanshan jue.

"In Chinese, we have the phrase 'yi rou ke gang', meaning 'to subdue the strong with the gentle'," says Zuo. "It conveys the idea of employing a flexible approach to overcome or deal with a powerful, rigid force, an idea embraced by almost everyone in ancient China, from philosophers and military strategists to martial artists.

"Yet, few had any idea that the use of a string saw, as we call it today, was perhaps one of the earliest and most successful attempts at breaking the seemingly unbreakable using subtle force, applied resolutely and relentlessly," he says.

While the string saw was doing its job, abrasives like quartz sand were continually added where the string chafed against the jade. They were moist, and therefore clingy, following the movement of the string. The aim was to expedite the reduction of jade with the help of a tougher material. (The nephrite grains resulting from this process served the same purpose.)
In a seminal piece of writing, Tang Chung, a leading expert in ancient Chinese jade, suggests a possible link between the string saw and the hunting bows widely used during the Neolithic period. In both cases, an extremely tough cord — believed to have probably been made of wild bull or deer tendons — was involved.

Within the vast area of what was to become China, the gradual adoption of the string-sawing technique followed — quite naturally — a similar north-to-south direction as the spread of jade culture.

About 1,200 kilometers to the southwest of Xiaonanshan lies another important Neolithic site known as Xinglongwa. The Xinglongwa culture, believed to have prospered between 6200 and 5400 BC, is noted for its pottery and jade creations. In fact, some scholars consider it to represent the beginning of nephrite jade's preeminence in East Asia, pointing to what they call a "regional standardization" that dictated both the selection and production of its jadeware. A yellow-green nephrite was favored above all else, and the use of the string saw became de rigueur.

"In Xinglongwa societies, nephrite jades were rare, exquisite and enduring objects, which are qualities within the modern definition of precious stones," goes a line from a co-authored chapter that forms part of The Oxford Handbook of Early China, published by the Oxford University Press.

And for exactly that reason, jades were associated with special members of the Xinglongwa settlements, which were "exceptionally large for their time period" to quote from the same chapter. "Those who were buried with jades often had other exceptional burial goods, such as animal sacrifices and human skull accessories," it goes.

Almost exclusively found within the burials were slit rings, which, judging by their relative position to the human remains, were most likely to have been worn as earrings.

The influence of the culture was felt far and wide. From the fifth millennium BC, Xinglongwa nephrite slit rings, pendants and beads spread into the Amur River region, coastal Far East Russia and the Sea of Japan region. (It's worth noting that the world's earliest nephrite jade usage is believed to have taken place nearly 30,000 years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic period in Russia Siberia, although there's no evidence indicating that this tradition was somehow related to the jade culture of Xiaonanshan.)

Down south, imitations of the Xinglongwa jadeware, realized using other materials, including quartzite, talcum and seashells, were discovered in major Neolithic cultural groups in the Yangtze River Delta region, including Majiabang.

Lasting between 5000 and 3900 BC, the Majiabang culture is of special significance in the sense that it eventually gave rise to the Songze culture (3900-3300 BC), which culminated in the formation of the Liangzhu culture (3300-2300 BC).

"An early regional state" — that's what Liangzhu represented according to the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, which in 2019 put Liangzhu's archaeological ruins on its World Heritage List.

Those who arrived at that conclusion must have examined, very closely, the splendid jade creations of Liangzhu artisans, which testify to the existence of a unified belief system, one of the benchmarks for early statehood. And judging by the tooling marks left on these creations, the use of a string saw seems to have been employed, not diligently, but religiously.

"I am tempted to believe that it was not a mere technical decision. The Liangzhu jade workers, in their single-minded adoption of the string saw, were aiming for something other than handiness and efficiency, something that's deeply spiritual," Tang writes.

The scholar has found support for his view in the 1993 book Technological Choices: Transformation in Material Cultures Since the Neolithic, edited by Pierre Lemonnier, which asserts that in any society, the choices of technology are made on the basis of cultural values and social relations, rather than on the inherent benefits of the technology itself.

"From Xiaonanshan to Liangzhu, symbolism had been accruing where there was once a simple technical solution," says Tang, who's also a professor at Shandong University.

In fact, the Chinese jade story has been steeped in symbolism since day one, says Teng Shu-ping, an ancient Chinese jade scholar from Taiwan. One example she gives is the slit ring. Continually being made in relatively large quantities until the 5th century BC, the slit ring was, according to Teng, connected to a prominent type of ancient Chinese jade known as bi, meaning disc, which she believes was created to reflect the cosmological view of people in prehistoric times, thousands of years before these views were committed to words.

Pointing to the incised concentric grooves that had started to appear on the surface of the discs around 1400 BC, Teng suggests that these lines could be "the sun's different tracks as it moves across the sky over the course of one year".

"The sun's height varies through the seasons. While its course at the summer solstice is represented by the innermost of the concentric circles, its course at the winter solstice, the outermost of the circles," she says. "The center represents the North Celestial Pole, one of the two points — the other being the South Celestial Pole — in the sky where the Earth's axis of rotation, indefinitely extended, intersects the celestial sphere, or the 'canopy heaven' as Chinese would call it."

By cutting an aperture across the radius of a disc, the ancient jade workers had not only created a celestial passage, but also imbued a form of ornamental jade with heavenly meaning.

"It's believed that the slit rings, before their secularization, were worn solely by religious figures — the officiants for example — in prehistoric societies," says Teng. "During China's Spring and Autumn Period, between the 8th century and the 5th century BC, they were routinely worn by female members of the aristocracy, and were listed in contemporaneous documents as tian, which shared the same pronunciation with the Chinese character for 'heaven'.
"The name jue, as it's called today, is a misnomer which has only served to conceal the story behind the slit ring."

And that story didn't end there. About 1,300 km southwest of the Xiaonanshan site, in relative proximity to Xinglongwa, lies the heartland of another, later Neolithic culture known as Hongshan (the Red Mountain). There, archaeologists have unearthed not only slit rings dated to between 3300 and 3000 BC, but also what's believed to be one of the oldest types of jade dragon ever found in China, whose wrinkled nose and pricked ear have earned it the nickname "pig dragon".

Dated to around 3500 BC, these pig dragons, whose making clearly involved the use of string saws, all feature a curled-up body with a barely touching head and tail. "They had clearly taken a cue from the slit rings of Xiaonanshan," says Teng.

In the 16th century BC, Chinese history entered the Shang Dynasty, the existence of which is firmly supported by archaeological evidence, including tens of thousands of pieces of bronze and jade ware. Among the latter group is a type of jade dragon coiled in a way that allows its head and tail to almost meet. "Jueformed dragon" is how they are referred to by archaeologists, who couldn't help but notice the striking resemblance between them and the slit rings.

"The ancestors of the Shang people are believed to have migrated from the frozen ground of the northeast to the fertile land of the Yellow River Valley, before they settled down, rose to power and ruled until 11th century BC," says Teng.

"The continuity of Chinese culture, although not always easily noticeable, is remarkable to say the least," she says. "Someone just needs to connect the dots."