I'm supposed to be in a rush because I'm leaving this weekend for Christmas and New Year in Thailand and Cambodia, but I can't resist the call of jade.

First of all, none of Vic's pieces looks like recent production to me. Provenance is important, I think, and often helps me to make up my mind, partly because it's usefully reassuring to learn from earlier collectors' expertise (and from their mistakes), but also for a kind of sentimental connection with someone else's passion. Actually, I knew the Lammers, Frank and Cheng, back in the 70s and they, and especially she, were important figures in the collecting scenes in Singapore, Hong Kong and Indonesia. She was one of the first people to study Southeast Asian ceramics seriously and wrote several books about them; I learned quite a bit from her and after her death bought several pieces from her collection. They weren't famous for their jade, but I don't think they would have been likely to own anything that was obviously a recent fake, and quite independently, I don't see any sign of that here.

However, it's important to remember that just a short time ago - the 60s and 70s - even the most knowledgeable people had a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding about jade production in particular. I just pulled out a book I bought in 1972 by Lefebvre d'Argencé about the Avery Brundage Collection of Chinese Jades in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. It seemed so authoritative then, and it's clearly so full of mistakes, especially about dates, today. Such examples should stand as a warning.

Duly warned, I'll stick my neck out and say that I'm not convinced that any of Vic's pieces is undoubtedly ancient. Let me post a couple of examples of scabbard chapes (they were decorations for scabbards, not swords), one from the Met, which seems to be Han to me though it's described in the catalogue as Eastern Zhou to Han, and the other a century or so earlier that's in the Ashmolean. I've been lucky enough to hold both of them, skin to stone, at different times - a rare experience in today's museums. The carving differs considerably, but in both of them the pattern is much more assured, less hesitant than in Vic's. And then, with the vigorous chilong dragon, there's something wrong, I think, about the carving of the head, the body is overdone, and the blackened surface looks as though it's been deliberately burnt - which was done all the time by late Ming Dynasty antiquities dealers who catered to a taste for ancient artefacts among the nouveau riche. Just like today.

My own hunch is that these pieces may date from that time, though there's another faint possibility that they could have been made as late as the 1920s or 30s when there was quite a big demand for ancient jades among foreigners in North China. I don't know much about the characteristics of that production, but there are lots, I'm told, in the storerooms of western museums.

I hope I'm wrong about this, Vic. Likewise with your pendant, Yankee, but sorry, I'm as close to 100% certain that it's like no Han pendant and no Han tiger I've ever seen.

Well, I've put off my packing long enough. A happy new year to all.

Cheers,

Will