Jewelry in ancient China was worn by both men and women, by rich and poor. Jewelry was made of jade, silver, gold, clay, stone, and coins. Silver was more popular than gold. Jade was the most popular of all. Everyone wanted jade jewelry. Jade was believed to protect the owner. Jewelry was also made using a system of fabric knots.
Jewelry included amulets, pins, headbands, rings, earrings, and headdresses. Designs were varied and interesting. One emperor demanded his jewelry always include a 5-clawed dragon in various designs.
Clothing in Ancient China
Makeup in Ancient China
Women in Ancient China
Daily Life in Ancient China
Much of Chinese jewelry, of both recent and early date, displays the skill of the Chinese craftsmen, yet the work of the goldsmith or lapidary applied to personal ornament does not represent so distinct a branch of craft as it does in the West. Most of the jewelry is designed to adorn the costume rather than the person: necklaces, bracelets, and earrings are comparatively rare, headdresses and elaborate hairpins being the more common forms attached to the person. In the traditional costume of recent times, ornate hooks and buckles were used to attach girdles, and women wore strings of beads, often multiple and variously spaced, with decorative plaques and other larger ornaments interspersed. The beads might be attached to the neck, head, or waist, and their purpose was to dignify the whole figure, rather than to display the fine quality of a curiously wrought gem. In any case, the splendour of the stuff of the costume, with richly woven or embroidered ornament, provided the distinctions of rank and wealth, and jewelry was often dispensed with altogether.
In the time of the Shang dynasty, in the last centuries of the 2nd millennium bce, bone and ivory hairpins with ends carved in the form of birds or abstract figures were a popular adornment. The many finely wrought, small jade plaques of the period, depicting animals in profile, are in many cases clearly intended for sewing to the costume. The earliest evidence of gold ornaments belongs to the time about 400 bce, though these are harness mounts, or weapon parts, rather than jewelry in the usual sense. The latter is better represented by the belt hooks (said to have been adopted from the nomads of inner Asia) that were probably worn by both men and women. They were mostly made of bronze, with fine cast ornaments usually of abstracted dragon and bird heads. These belt hooks were inlaid with gold or silver foil, polished fragments of turquoise, or more rarely with jade or glass; sometimes they were gilded.
Toward the end of the Han dynasty, probably not before the later 2nd century ce, the art of granulation was communicated to China from the Hellenized region of the Black Sea coast. Granulation can be traced in China until about the 10th century ce, its discontinuation in the East curiously coinciding with the loss of the technique in the West. Granulation was combined with filigree, and hairpins, combs, earrings, and costume plaques survive in some quantity, particularly from the richly furnished tombs of the Tang dynasty (618–907 ce). There are plaques with birds and flowers delineated by soldered wire, inlaid with turquoise, on a ground of fine granulation that appears like a dust of gold.
The employment of the repoussé technique in gold and silver, particularly on the heads of combs, can be attributed to the Tang period but became more common in the Song dynasty (960–1279 ce). Meanwhile, hairpins of filigree, with heads shaped as butterflies or flowers, sometimes with pearls or small jade additions, continued the age-old fashion. A scented hairpin takes the place of the scarf or ring of European romance. They were called pu yao (“shaking while walking”) and were loosely made so as to sway when the wearer moved. Gilded bronze and silver were the principal materials. There are accounts of elaborate headdresses, some no doubt of the kind representing a complete phoenix such as are to be seen on clay tomb statuettes of the Tang period, but no surviving examples of these can be attributed with certainty to the Song period. Jade ornaments during this period were still attached to the costume.
Jewelry survives in greater quantity from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644 ce) and gives an impression of greater taste for elaborate figural and floral designs in high repoussé relief and for the effect of semiprecious stones, which were prized for their colour. They are never elaborately faceted, being simply ground flat and beveled at the edge for the most part, and are set nearly always en cabochon, with little polishing, sometimes even retaining the irregularities of the pebble. The stones are invariably semiprecious: amethyst, agate, chalcedony, pink and other quartzes, and jade. Until modern times, this last has been the most admired of the stones, especially the white variety, which was used for spacers and linking pieces in the silk and beaded hangings of elaborate costumes. The plaques of silver repoussé with flowers and scenes of people were probably used only by men as belt ornaments. Apart from the signet ring, the use of which may not go back beyond Ming times, the male could affect jewelry only in his accoutrement.