When did the jade collection begin? If you are a collector of others to ask when you began to have a jade collection, this common sense you should know, the earliest we found that the jade collection is from the archaeological excavation of the tomb appeared, one is the Anyang Yin Ruins Women's Good Tomb unearthed in the Shijiahe culture of the jade phoenix, it is much earlier than the Shang Dynasty, there is a representative tomb is in Chengdu Jinsha site, should be the western Zhou period tomb, found the Liangzhu period of jade, the appearance of these two artifacts told us in the tombs of the ancients, There will be authentic jade artifacts that predate his contemporaries, and there are several possibilities for such treasures, one is a kind of loot plunder in the war between tribes, the other is the exchange of courtesies between various tribes at that time, and the other is that individuals like to collect.
But it can not represent a fundamental problem in the collection, we also found a large number of jade in the tomb of The Marquis of Jiangxi Haidu is actually earlier than the Han Dynasty, many of which are from the Spring and Autumn Warring States period, experts at that time speculated that it may be some jade that Liu He brought back from the warehouse in Kyoto when he was emperor for more than 20 days, because it is obvious that this is not the manufacture of the Han Dynasty, some are Spring and Autumn, some are Warring States, when the real jade began to form a scale into the collection industry, in fact, from the Song Dynasty, Because from the perspective of the time of the Song Dynasty, the Song Dynasty is from the Xia Shang Zhou is the Spring and Autumn War Han to the Qin and Han Dynasties, which has passed more than 1,000 years, and these 1,000 years of time have the time element of jade collection.
The second Song Dynasty is a literati society, we know that the Song Dynasty Yang Wen or five, the Song Dynasty emperor Song Huizong are the largest epigraphers, the Song Dynasty people's study of traditional cultural artworks has also reached a very high artistic realm, especially among the literati bureaucrats and doctors, this cultural atmosphere is very strong, the study and collection of antiquities has gradually formed a climate, collecting and examining antiquities has gradually become a trend, and there is also a factor that during the Song Dynasty, commercial development was very rapid, shops were everywhere, For the circulation of this kind of commodity also to provide convenient conditions, in this commercial background and stable social prosperity, antiques also came into being, which is what we later called the prosperous antiques, although we have always said that there were wars and chaos during the Two Song Dynasties, but the economic life and humanistic spirit of the Song Dynasty has always been a peak of our Chinese nation, it is difficult to be surpassed by future generations, the economic development of the Song Dynasty is related to the way of thinking of the literati society at that time, and it also has a lot to do with it.
With the rapid economic development, the antique industry has begun to have a large number of pursuits, the love of literati inkers, the antique industry in the earliest when it was just established, just appeared, its content is still very monotonous, unlike now we are all buying calligraphy and painting, buy porcelain, in the Song Dynasty period antique collection only three categories, the first is bronze, the second is the inscription, the third is jade, the study of these antique collections in the past called epigraphy, this only learned people will study epigraphy, Because the text on the bronze we call Jin Wen, also called Zhong Ding Wen, the inscription is a very important way to pass down our traditional culture, in some large Han tablets including some tomb stele, it can record a lot of important historical facts, jade is a crystallization of human art craftsmanship, song Dynasty Lü DaLin's archaeological map and Xue Shanggong, the successive Zhong Ding Yi style Fa Ti, which includes a large number of Han Dynasty jade shapes.
A very important premise of the collection of antiques is that it must be social and economic prosperity, antiques are with the nature of commodities, it is circulating, during the Song Dynasty it is the economic prosperity has reached a peak state, now we can see Zhang Zeduan left in the Northern Song Dynasty, a painting of the prosperity of the Business of Bieliang is called Qingming On the River Map, in the Qingming River Map we can see the shops at that time, the restaurant shops are full of small commodities Trading and circulation is very prosperous, And at that time, the city's economic conditions and the people's lives lived and worked in peace and contentment, a prosperous scene, in the Northern Song Dynasty Tokyo Bieliang is now the Kaifeng area, the city's antique shops are also everywhere, in the Qingming River map we can also find a small shop for antique sales, and in the Tokyo Dream Hualu this book also recorded the pearls and jade, calligraphy and paintings, treasures of the record of antiques at that time is some of the sales records of antiques.
When the Southern Song Dynasty arrived in the capital city of Lin'an, that is, now Hangzhou, there was a shop specializing in the sale of ancient jade, called the Seven Treasures Society, the jade varieties sold in the Seven Treasures Society are jade belts, jade wan, jade vases, jade rings, including crystals, agate, and some other gems, at that time there was also a very enthusiastic atmosphere, that is, the ancient jade as a gift gift and visit relatives and friends including an important gift exchanged between each other. We can also see from the archives that the chancellor Zhang Junyi entered the gifts of Emperor Gaozong of Song with only one jade record in the archives of 42 items of old and new jade, and in the Yuan Dynasty Zhu Derun's ancient jade examination book, it is a systematic record of jade collection books, although the middle of the search for a catalogue of only 41 pieces of ancient jade, but it marks the formation of a specialization of the collection of ancient jade, began to have been from the collection of categories of separate columns, to the specialization and theorization of research to form a system.