Two Xiaonanshan jade blades, one pierced

玉匕

Source term: yu bi (jade bi-shaped blade)

玉匕 (yù bǐ): 'jade bi' — the bi-shaped blade, an elongated tongue of jade pierced at one end; here in the earliest known jade-working tradition of Northeast Asia.

On a low hill above the Ussuri River, where China now meets the Russian Far East, a looted grave exposed in 1991 by men rebuilding a watchtower gave up sixty-seven pieces of worked jade — and when archaeologists returned to Xiaonanshan between 2015 and 2019 they found a burial ground so old that it pushed the origins of systematic jade-working back to around nine thousand years ago, a thousand years before the famous jades of Xinglongwa and a thousand kilometres to the north. Among the rings and slit earrings of tomb M1 lay two slender jade blades. One, catalogued M1:23, is a flat polished strip drilled through near its tip by a hole no wider than two millimetres; the other has no hole at all. They are classed as ornaments, as such blades always are. But the pierced one is a thin blade made to hang, and perhaps swing, from a single end hole — and here it appears at the very dawn of jade, at the edge of the known world of its makers: the earliest and northernmost member of the series.

Particulars

Object

Two jade bi-shaped blades (M1:23, M1:24) among the 67-piece jade assemblage of tomb M1 at Xiaonanshan, a hill on the west bank of the Ussuri River near the Russian border. M1:23 is a flat, finely polished strip pierced near the top by a small (~0.2 cm) biconically drilled hole; M1:24 appears unperforated. The tomb's jades — 45 rings, 11 slit rings, beads, an axe, a spear, a hairpin and the two bi-blades — belong to a burial horizon that recent radiocarbon dating places around 7250–6650 BC, roughly a millennium before the Xinglongwa jades and about a thousand kilometres further north.

Function

Catalogued within an early jade ornament set.