A large and impressive archaic pale green jade ceremonial blade (Ge), Erlitou culture

Collection of Angus Forsyth.

Anthony Carter Ltd., London.

Jades from China, Museum of East Asian Art, Bath, 1994, cat. no. 75.

Roger Keverne, Jade, London, 1991, fig. 49.

The present blade is particularly noteworthy in the complexity of its handle design, with a finely incised lozenge design above a pair of drilled holes on a horizontal ground, and seven hafting flanges at the end of the tang. These flanges, based on — or produced concurrently with — bronze prototypes were presumably carved to accept a wooden handle but serve a dual function accentuating the beauty of the stone and the skill of the carver. While a small number of closely comparable blades survive, examples of this quality and size with seven divisions in the tang appear to be exceedingly rare. 

Compare a closely related blade with a seven-flange tang from the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, in Alfred Salmony, Chinese Jade Through the Wei Dynasty, New York, 1963, pl. 2 (Fig. 1), its handle also decorated with lozenge shapes but rendered in the more heavy Shang fashion; and another apparently very closely related blade uncovered from Shangguocun, Wenxi, Shanxi province, illustrated by line drawing in Jessica Rawson, Chinese Jade from the Neolithic to the Qing, London, 1995, p. 58, fig. 41, alongside a blade of more conventional five-flanged tang in the collection of the British Museum, London (accession no. 1945.10-17.74), p. 193, fig. 3; and a four-flanged example from the Hotung Collection of similar length but more typical Anyang style carving, pl. 10:23. 

A related blade of slightly curved form but similarly slender with a hatched design and grooved tang from the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection is preserved at the Harvard Art Museums and illustrated in Max Loehr, Ancient Chinese Jades, Cambridge, 1975, pl. 45; another of very similar stone with its five-flange tang slightly more reserved from the curved blade is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (accession no. 71-1936) in Stanley Charles Nott, Chinese Jade throughout the Ages, London, 1936, pl. VI; and a miniature variation of this design with hafted tang and diamond pattern above the handle was uncovered from Tomb 120 at Qianzhangdan, Tengzhou, Shandong in Gu Fang, The Complete Collection of Jades Unearthed in China, vol. 4: Shandong, Beijing, 2005, p. 102.