Paula once had an intact necklace (pic below) about which Stefany related:

"Necklaces like this are very familiar to me. I've had several
I tend to think they are Japanese not Chinese, and may have been made specially for tourists of the early C20th.
They include various types of large-holed beads, mostly spherical, including lacquer with or without inlays, large spherical stone beads, large well-made glass with crumbs, or swirls to suggest malachite or agate, beads with relief designs in sealing wax over terracotta either patterns or double masks, some metal beads resembling ojime, knobbly "Rudraksha" style nuts, carved Ivory or bone. The "Coral" twig-like shapes are stained bone. Sometimes these strings include glass spherical beads of yellow with pink rounds added to look like "Hornbill" beads.
98 is divisible by 7 and the intact strands I've handled usually have a seeming random layout but in fact the sequence has several repeats. Your stringing is almost certainly original."

Weirdly riveting are a series of Japanese videos demonstrating exactly - and I do mean exactly - how some traditional lacquer products are made. For purposes of our discussion on these molded beads, there is one video where the artist shows how "tonoko" powder (some kind of polishing mineral - emery? clay?) is kneaded into lacquer to make a putty for use in base layers. Not too big a step to see how this material could be molded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRu7LHG2cgA

Interestingly, actual cinnabar ("nikka-shu" - vermilion made with mercury sulfide?) is also used:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09fWbdlCrUs

And ferrous sulfate for black:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jivIOSHYCU