Cast brass guard

Commonly, Chinese sword guards were fabricated from sheet metals and brazed or forge welded. The following example is of a one-piece casting, and probably dates from the late Qing. The four lobe design was a popular one in the Ming and Qing Dynasties and it can be found on both jian and dao.

The hole for the tang is a trapezoidal in shape, indicating that this guard was once fitted to a dao blade.

Dao guard with casting defect

 The top lobe of the guard (above), has a void in the brass where the molten metal didn't fill the mould completely.

The guard has been roughly fashioned without taking time to make it truly symmetrical, and the thickness of the rim is quite variable. This is normal for the fittings of ordinary Chinese swords. In contrast, modern reproduction fittings are usually pretty neat and pretty accurate in their symmetry. I prefer the crude, rustic charm of the old ones.

The cast surface on the inside of the rim is quite irregular

This brass guard was not brightly polished, it had been covered with black paint/lacquer. In the left lobe (below), there are two patches where the black coating has peeled away. The parts in the centre where the brass is showing bright, were caused by the loose hilt rubbing away the coating and patina.

Dao guard covered in paint / lacquer

      Dimensions:

Length - 3 6/16" (85mm)

Width - 2 1/4" (56mm)

Depth - 1/4" (7mm)

Weight - 105g

Precious wood jian hilt

Here a few pictures of the previous jian hilt. This hilt was made later than the blade, and is of a fairly rustic manufacture. It is difficult to the age of the blade, but given the amount of polishing it has had, I would estimate it to be mid-Qing or earlier. This is a well forged blade that has obviously been treasured, and has been re-hilted with precious wood, probably in the late Qing. The wood is very dense and very hard, and is most likely to be a Huali, but if anyone can positively identify it, I would be most grateful.

Huang huali wood?

The brass guard is ellipsoid in shape, and has been made from two pieces: a flat piece forming the body of the guard, and a strip bent around to form the rim. The picture below shows the join where the two pieces were brazed together, and also shows the diagonal scarf joint in the rim. The ferrule was formed from one strip of brass. The strip was bent to shape leaving an overlap and then the overlap was brazed.

The wooden pommel was made from one piece and the wooden grip was made in two halves. The grip sections may originally have been glued together. There is now a visible gap between the sections of the grip. This has been caused by corrosion of the tang forcing the sections apart.

The brass ferrules help to bind the two sections of the grip together and the decorative end cap serves to keep the pommel securely in place.

Carved decoration on the pommel cap

Not only is the hilt beautifully designed and very nicely made, it is also extremely comfortable to use.

Knuckle-guard jian

This is a rather unusual sword. Chinese jian blades can be found with a wide variety of hilt fittings, but this is the first time that I've seen one fitted up with a knuckle-guard.

Overall length - 26" [ 660mm] 

Blade length - 21 3/4" [554mm] 

Weight - 627g

The blade is very worn and shows unmistakeable signs of combat. The knuckle-guard is probably not original to the blade. Surprisingly, the sword does play quite well, but of course it is limited in movement by the guard. This somewhat restricts the flexibility of the wrist and has an effect on the balance so that the sword behaves more like a straight bladed zhibeidao than like a jian.

The short grip is made of a dense, light coloured hardwood with a thin coating of lacquer. The wood has been crudely cut to size and no attempt has been made to achieve a smooth finish or to remove any tool marks. None-the-less, the grip is quite comfortable to hold, and the irregular surface seems to be an advantage here.

The fittings are typically Chinese in style. Nicely functional, iron, wrought by hand.

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.

Sword saw

Chinese woodworker's home-made saw,  fitted up to look like a sword. Hardwood and brown lacquer.

 
Blade length is 375mm [14.75"] long,  the hilt is 204mm [8"] long, and the grip length is 102mm [4.25"].  Narrow blades like this are usually employed for cutting holes in wood rather than for cutting boards to dimensions.

The blade is fairly thick and has coarse, hand-cut teeth:

This is a nice example of the inventiveness of Chinese woodworkers. Woodworking tools were often decorated but his one is playful to the point of being humorous.

The decoration isn't perhaps what one would expect to see on a sword hilt, but it probably had some significance to the maker. The pommel is embellished with a bamboo motif, and the mask-head on the guard appears to be of a monkey in the clouds.

Slightly different on the other side:

Could this be the legendary Monkey King?