When we consider ancient masters of jade, our minds automatically turn to the Chinese – and not without reason. For the Chinese, jade is a sacred commodity, which was connected especially with longevity. It is for this reason that numerous high-ranking individuals of the Han Dynasty were interred in the famous jade armour, which it was hoped would preserve their corpse. But while the Chinese produced a huge amount of jade, and worked it into an imaginative variety of shapes, they themselves recognised another Asian culture as the true master lapidaries: what they called Hindustan, a collective term for Afghanistan, Iran, Mongolia and – especially – Mughal India. In AD 1756, Emperor Qianlong was receiving his tribute as usual, when the Uighur leader Khoja Burhan al-Din presented him with a jade bowl from Mughal India. Qianlong was mesmerised; he wrote poems about the bowl, praising it as being ‘as thin as paper’ (xiàng zhi yīyàng báo). His obsession with ‘Hindustan jade’ grew, and he commissioned the Imperial jade workers to develop styles in imitation of the Mughal. The records of the Imperial Household also reveal that in AD 1762, Qianlong brought Muslim jade-carvers to the Forbidden City in Beijing to teach his Chinese lapidaries how to produce the kind of thin walls required by the style. The Imperial craftsmen developed a style so similar to their Mughal exemplars that later Chinese scholars could not tell the difference, and, indeed, Chinese and Indian products remain hard to distinguish to the untrained eye. But Qianlong lamented in his poetry, even into his old age, that ‘all the best carvings are from Hindustan’ (auoyou zuì hao de diāokè pin dōu láizì Yìndùsītan).

The nephrite jade which supplied both China and India was hewn from the quarries in the remote Kunlun Mountains in Xinjiang. However, there are slight differences between true Mughal work and the highly accomplished Chinese imitations. The Mughals never controlled the source of jade, which was in China, and so they only imported small amounts. They favoured the purest jade they could find, aiming for a smooth, flawless surface, which would be polished to a high sheen. Mughal jades are exceptionally thin, and are prized for their translucency. In China, meanwhile, the imperfections in jade were celebrated; Chinese craftsmen were imaginative, and made a feature of impurities where they found them. And while for Indians, jade was a prized foreign import, for the Chinese, jade was an important spiritual, ritual, social and economic phenomenon, deserving the highest respect. Additionally, while Chinese jade-workers used a treadle lathe while seated on a stool, Mughal craftsmen used a bow lathe while seated on the ground, with the resulting minute differences in the texture of the jade.

These distinguishing features allow us to determine that this chrysanthemum bowl is, in fact, of Mughal manufacture. It is exceptionally well-carved, living up to Qianlong’s praise that it was ‘as thin as paper’. Rising from a ring foot, the body of the vessel follows a broad and elegant tulip shape, terminating in a slightly everted rim. All around the bowl radiate perfectly aligned ridges, which imitate the petals of the chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum indicum), a plant with sacred connotations across Asia. In Japan, for example, the chrysanthemum remains to this day the heraldic emblem (mon) of the Imperial Household, while in China it was considered one of the ‘Four Gentlemen’ (sì jūnzi), the emblematic flowers of the Chinese. For the Indians, chrysanthemums symbolise long life and happiness, and are a popular flower decorating weddings. It is possible, then, that expensive jade chrysanthemum bowls may have been given as part of a dowry.