Page 28 - Chinese Decorative Arts: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 55, no. 1 (Summer, 1997)

Incense Set
....................................................................
late
igth
Qing dynasty, 18th-early century
Nephrite
H. vase 4 in. (10.2 cm)
Gif ofHeber R. Bishop, 1902
02.18.537

his incense set was made for domestic techniques jade manufacture and a taste for foreign jades was largely responsible for the
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use in a family altar rather than for a the stone into India. The earliest Mughal jades growth of the Mughal style in this medium in
religious setting. The vase would have held date from the late sixteenth century, and the China. He was particularly impressed by the
the spatula and tongs for handling the pow- craft flourished during the seventeenth and thinness of the Indian pieces, and, as a result,
dered incense, which would have been stored eighteenth centuries. some late-eighteenth-century works, especially
in the covered box and lit in the burner. A jade carved in the Mughal style was given those made in the imperial workshops in
The thin walls of the three vessels and the as tribute to the Qianlong emperor (r. I736-95) Beijing, have thinner walls than were common
delicate fluting of their sides are typical of in I758 by Mongol people known as the Ili in the Chinese tradition in an attempt to imi-
a
Chinese jades carved to resemble works pro- Dzungars. Additional works of this type made tate Mughal jades. The Indian jades in the
duced at the Mughal courts. The Mughals, who in India and Central Asia, often presented by National Palace Museum, Taipei, were once
ruled a large part of India from the sixteenth officials of Xinjiang Province, reached the part of the Qianlong emperor's collection
through the early nineteenth century, were court during the late eighteenth century. These and form the largest group of this material
descendants of the Timurid and Safavid rulers pieces were collected and studied by the surviving anywhere in the world. DPL
of Persia. They imported Persian and Turkish Qianlong emperor, whose fascination for the
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