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.

Breaking point

thin hickory rippings

Hickory woods are often regarded as some of the toughest and most resistant to breaking. Consequently,  hickory has long been the material of choice for hammer shafts and pick handles.  The one that I use for wooden swords is a pignut hickory. It is so resistant to breaking, that thin laths can be rolled up into tight curls.

In fact, it is so tough that it's almost impossible to snap or tear the thin rippings that come from the circular saw. When waste wood is this thin, I usually snap it into short lengths by hand.......but I can't do that with the hickory. I have to cut it all up with a saw!!!!!!

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?

Chinese 'Sword Dancer'

Chinese martial artist, possibly a street entertainer

A question of length

Very close to the heart of every woodworker are the problems of measurement, accuracy and reproduction. When designing, I spend much of my time transferring measurements from one drawing to another using marks on a strip of paper. This is not just an accurate way of transferring data but this

method makes it easy to repeat the procedure without having to remember any figures.  In the workshop, I generally use a length of wood marked out with a knife. A knife cut is thinner than a pencil line and is therefore more accurate.

As useful as this method is, it really only works within the confines of one workshop. If you want to share measurements with others over distance or time, then it is more convenient to have standardised units of length. The Chinese unit of measurement was the chi, commonly referred to as the 'Chinese foot'. Unlike the Imperial foot which is divided into 12 inches, the chi was a metric system, divided into ten units; .

One foot rules - Chinese horn, Chinese bamboo, English boxwood

Despite standardisation, the Chinese chi was somewhat variable in length. According to the author Louise Levathes*:

"....the official length of the chi, or Chinese foot, varied considerably throughout the Ming Dynasty, from 9.5 inches to over 13 inches. Moreover, the chi varied depending on what it was being used to construct and where it was being used......"

Of course this variability does present some irritating difficulties for anyone trying to interpret measurements mentioned in old Chinese texts!

Comparative lengths of Chinese rules

I have two Chinese rules [see above pics]: one made of horn that is of a significant age, and one made of bamboo. The bamboo one is newer, and was made some time during the last century. The 'brass' dots on the horn example are surprisingly free from tarnish and so are probably a low quality gold. The divisions are not entirely uniform along the length and also,  the rules are twisted and bent. It would have been quite difficult to do very accurate work with these, so perhaps they were intended to be used more as a rough guide. 

I imagine that whatever measuring methods were employed by the Chinese craftsmen of old, they would still have used the woodworker's maxim:

"Measure twice and cut once!"

  

* 'When China Ruled the Seas' - by Louise Levathes - Oxford University Press