Jade and Femininity: The Transnational Creation of Values of Chinese Jade as Women’s Jewellery in the Early Twentieth Century

This paper discusses the co-creation of the cultural and aesthetic values of jade as a form of women’s jewellery in China and the West in the early decades of the twentieth century. I argue that women, both inside China and abroad, played a crucial role in mediating these values. Here, I look at the fashion icon Oei Hui-lan and her conspicuous choice of jade jewellery. Jade became a material conduit through which she expressed a particular version of Chinese femininity to a global audience. Her passion for jade was inspired by her experiences in Beijing, where she began to learn about the connoisseurship of jade from the Chinese jade merchants. She updated the image of jade and its association with the imperial past by combining jade, especially green jade, with fashionable Western dress and jewellery or qipao. Her sartorial combinations and international exposure contributed to the trend of popularizing green jade, which was then both traditional and modern, in the West. The absorption and rise of green jade in the Western discourse and realm of women’s jewellery in the 1920s and 1930s occurred across multiple layers from high-end jewellery houses such as Cartier which favoured the colour combination of blue and green in their designs to the more popular local department stores and jewellery shops. The colour green dominated as one of the stone’s most attractive qualities; but the other qualities of jade were equally translated and marketed in the West. A key point is that these cultural and aesthetic values of jade as jewellery created a global circuit of understanding and imagination of the stone that was gendered and heavily identified with varying portrayals of Chineseness.

Kuldip Kaur Singh is a current DPhil student from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. Her research investigates the industry and craft of jade in China from the late Qing to the 1960s, looking at how jade functioned and circulated as raw material, commodities, and art across different levels of the Chinese and global societies.