Jade Carving

Jade is extremely hard and granular in nature. It cannot be easily fractured and must be worked slowly with the use of abrasive sands (such as corundum or garnet for long periods of time.

Chipping, scraping, drilling and rubbing are some of the basic techniques used by the ancient craftspeople in creating various kinds of jade objects.

Although the precise method/s of carving is still unknown, since no surviving instruments are recovered at sites, we could, however, deduce the possible methods by examining the holes and carved grooves of remaining artifacts. A number of drilling methods such as uniform boring - when a hole is drilled through from one side, either with a solid, hemispherical drill head or a hollow bamboo rod - and ox-nose loophole - a hole that is perforated from the same side of an object, creating a U-shaped tunnel that allows the passage of a thin rope - were used since the Neolithic period, an age over 6000 years ago!

To bore holes, wooden drill heads and bamboo sticks were used in association with abrasive material to facilitate the process. These instruments may have been dipped in an abrasive paste mixed with animal hide glue. Once dried, the rod can then be rotated in high speed against the stone to create various kinds of holes and grooves.

To produce flat surfaces, such as slicing slabs of jade material from a boulder, a string impregnated with abrasive can be use to saw through material in a swing-saw process of cutting. Even diamond was reportedly used in the Neolithic period for jade carving.