Red papered grip wrap

I'm very pleased to say that Peter Dekker's tigersden jian is still going strong. After several years of sparring it now has a well dented blade but still no chips or cracks.

tigers den wooden jian

Peter has recently replaced the grip wrapping, and this time he has used an olive-green, coarse cotton cord over a red paper backing.

Old and new Chinese grip wrapping papers

This is a traditional wrap that is technically difficult to do well, but as you can see, Peter has done a really excellent job:

Wraps of this type can be found on late 19th century jian and dao.  Here is a backing paper from an old jian that Peter has refurbished:

Grip wrapping paper from a period jian

The paper is much degraded, but you can still make out remnants of the calligraphy. Sadly, we can no longer decipher what it says though it was almost certainly designed to affect the fortunes of the person wielding the sword. It may well have been a blessing or very likely a wish for long life, but a hidden message like this could just as easily have been a curse. This sounds rather like the stuff of Kung Fu legend, but it was not unusual for charms like this to be used in China.  There were even arcane manuals on the subject.

Quite thought provoking......it makes me wonder how many of us possess antiques that are cursed or charmed?



Information and pics in this post are courtesy of Peter Dekker,  mandarinmansion.com

Wire and lacquer scabbards

I have a liking for old scabbards that are bound with wire and coated with a thin layer of black lacquer. I'm sure that I shouldn't really like them, because they are often not of the best quality....but none-the-less, I do. Usually considered to made in the late Qing and Republican eras. It quite normal for surviving examples to have lacquer missing and the the wire detached and displaced.

Period jian with wire and black lacquer scabbard

In the next pic, you can see that the lacquer has worn exposing the copper wire, and without the lacquer to hold it in place, the wire moves around.

At the top centre of the pic, the round mark underneath the wire is a knot in the wood. Just below that you can see a groove in the lacquer where the copper wire sat. So, this scabbard was first coated in black lacquer, then bound with a single copper wire from mouth to chape, and then lacquered again before the fittings were added. The surface of the underlying wood is quite rough. This was probably done on purpose to give the lacquer a better key.

Here is another jian scabbard from the same era. This one has had the wire and black lacquer removed and it has been re-coated in a brown lacquer.

The brown lacquer has chipped away to reveal marks left by the original wire wrap. What is interesting about this one, is that the black lines are grooves that have been burned into the wood. This wire had not been applied over a coating of lacquer, but must have been heated up as it was applied to the bare wood.

I imagine that would be quite a tricky job to do well. It's hard to know if burning a groove into the wood made the wires more secure, but this one certainly didn't survive.

The cord has fade to a rather nice blue-ish, purple-ish colour, but I suspect that it was originally black. The grip is bound in the same cord but it is not original to the jian.

Ming jian

Statues on the road to the Ming tombs at Nanking.

These Ming military figures carry jian as a side arm.

I love these old photographs, the statues look wonderfully imposing in this wild, natural setting.