The reigns of China’s Emperors Kangxi (AD 1654 – AD 1722) and Qianlong (AD 1735 – AD 1796) were celebrated as a time of great imperial might and cultural achievement, long remembered as ‘the prosperous era of Kangxi and Qianlong’ (Kāng Qián shèngshì). This was the time of the pax sinica, the peace enforced over neighbouring regions by the might of the Qing Dynasty. As part of its de facto control over neighbouring states, China extracted tribute from their leaders, cementing the Qing Emperor’s position as a king among kings. 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’ – a reductive term which lumped together the jade products of Mughal India, Timurid Iran, and Mongolia – 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 tradition of jade-carving in the Mughal style continued under Qianlong’s son, Jiaqing (reigned AD 1796 – AD 1820), who similarly invested in the Imperial workshops, though never with the zeal and connoisseurship of his father. 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. It was closely associated with immortality and afterlife – indeed, Chinese elites of the Han Dynasty were buried in jade suits in the belief their bodies would be preserved – and alongside gold was one of the emblematic materials of heaven (tiān). As a result, Chinese craftsmen were hesitant to work jade to quite the same thinness as their Mughal counterparts, for fear that it might break, and out of an aversion to wasting the precious material. Finally, while Mughal craftsmen used a bow lathe while seated on the ground, Chinese lapidaries used a treadle lathe while seated on a stool, with the resulting minute differences in the texture of the jade.

This extraordinary jade bowl reflects the skill of the Chinese craftsmen in imitating the Mughal style. The jade itself is of a rich green colour (so-called spinach jade), highly prized in both China and India compared to paler forms. The walls are remarkably thin, with exceptional translucency. The bowl itself is in the traditional shape of a tea bowl. The base is flat, rising from a short ring-foot. Around the foot are various petals reminiscent of the chrysanthemum (júhuā), a plant with important cultural significance across South and East Asia, and which was considered one of the ‘Four Gentlemen’ (sì jūnzi), the emblematic flowers of the Chinese. Around the elegantly-curved body of the bowl are various foliate tendrils, which curve and interact in a baroque style. At the centre of each pair of tendrils is a flower with curling petals and a tall stamen – perhaps an orchid. Around the rim of the bowl is a Chinese cloud pattern (xiángyún, ‘auspicious clouds’) which betray its origin in the Beijing Imperial Workshop.