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Hi Colly,
I sent an email before we left China but I'm not sure if you received it. I just wanted to thank you for organising our tour in Beijing. We had a wonderful time and think Kathy was a great guide, with very good English.
We will certainly recommend your company to any friends who visit Beijing.
Regards
Lynn Porus and family (from New Zealand)
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Antiques
 A
good place to find a wide selection of antiques
is at Liulichang. Liulichang is a street in
Xuanwumen, and many of the stores are quite
old. This area has everything from scrolls,
to jade articles to decadesold cigarette ad
posters. There are definitely treasures to
be found here,but it is hard to tell genuine
antiques from dirty fakes. Real antiques are
supposed to bear a red official seal that
proves their authenticity, but sometimes real
ones don't have it and fake ones do. The best
attitude to have is: if you like it and you
can bargain down to a price you can accept,
just go for it. Small jade articles and silver
trinkets make great presents for people at
home and they are easy to take on the plane.
 Another
large antiques market is the Antiques City
at Panjiayuan. This is a multi-story building
which is full of antiques and general kitsch.
The same rules apply here as in Liulichang:
if you like it , get it. Don't worry if it
is fake or not. Many of the things are not
real antiques, but on the other hand, recently
a 50,000-year-old fossil was confiscated from
one of the sellers there. The fossil was on
sale for about US$150, so you never know.
Beijing Curio City, gathering
more than 250 curio shops under one roof,
is China's largest trade center for antiques
and fold art works. Many of the dealers are
themselves connoisseurs and curio collectors.
Antiques that date before 1795 are forbidden
for sale or export. Those dated between 1796
and 1949* should bear a small red seal and
a Certificate for Relics Export from the Beijing
Cultural Relics Bureau(BCRB), to allow them
to be taken out of Chin. The seal also proves
the genuineness of the items. A word of caution:
keep receipts which should indicate the name
and age of the antiques if these items are
bought in BCRB designated stores.
Cloisonn(Jingtailan)
 The
art of Jingtailan (Cloisonn) is a unique
combination of sculpture, painting, porcelain
making and copper-smithing that is said to
have originated in Beijing during the Yuan
Dynasty (1271-1368). The oldest extant piece
was made during the Yuan Dynasty, but Jingtailan
underwent a major change during the Ming Dynasty
when at about 1450 to 1456, a new blue pigment
was discovered and gave Jingtailan its current
name based on the Chinese word lan for blue.
Ming Dynasty Jingtailan is also considered
to be the most intricate. Nevertheless, Jingtailan
reached its peak during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911)
due to great innovations in copper-melting
techniques.
At present, Jingtailan is classified into
two categories: Jingtailan and Flower-strip
Jingtailan, each of which has several sub-varieties
respectively.
The making of Jingtailan requires rather elaborate
and complicated processes; base-hammering,
copper-strip inlay, soldering, enamel-filling,
enamel-firing, polishing and gilding. The
products are featured by excellent quality.
The skill and workmanship have been handed
down from the Ming Dynasty. Since the founding
of new China, quite a number of new varieties
have been created. It enjoys a high reputation
both at home and abroad with most of its products
for export.
All the products are beautiful and elegant
in molding, brilliant and dazzling in colors
and splendid and graceful in design. It is
a famous local handicraft in Beijing region.
Jingtailan can be found on large objects such
as vases and other large utensils and decorative
items, as well as small items like earrings,
bracelets, chopsticks or jars.
As a substitute for the more costly process
of inlaying with precious or semiprecious
stones, enamelwork (falang m)
was developed to give the surface of metal
objects a vitreous glaze by intense heat to
create a brilliantly coloured decorative effect.
Enamel is a kind of soft glass,  compounded
of flint or sand, red lead, and soda or potassium.
These materials are melted together, producing
an almost clear glass flux with a slighly
bluish or greenish tinge. Clear flux is the
base from which coloured enamels are made,
the colouring agent being a metallic oxide,
introduced into the flux when it is in a molten
state. Otherwise, the addition of calx, a
mixture of tin and calcined lead, renders
translucent enamels opaque. Solidified "cakes"
of cooled enamel are pulverized into a fine
powder. The powder then is spread on the metal
object's surface and is dried in front of
the furnace before introduced into the muffle
of the furnace itself. The vessel being heated
to the point at which the enamel fuses and
adheres to its metal base, the firing of enamel
takes only a few minutes.
Painted enamels in China are also called Canton
enamels as this city was the principal seat
of their manufacture. This technique is directly
influenced by Western art, and a great part
of Canton enamels was indeed produced for
export. The Chinese called the painted enamel
"Western porcelain" (yangci
), the decoration "Western colors"
(yangcai ) as it is very different
from the traditional Chinese motifs and colors.
Painted enamels are made by laying a ground
of opaque enamel, generally white or opaque,
and on this the main colors are superimposed
and fired.
Cloisonn (qiasi falang zm)
is a special technique, by which thin strips
of metal are bent and curved to follow the
outline of a decorative pattern. They are
then soldered to the surface of the metal
object, forming miniature walls that meet
and create little cells between them. Into
these cells, powdered enamel is laid and fused.
After is has cooled, the surface can be polished
to remove imperfections. Champlev is the
opposite process of cloisonn technique:
The surface of the object is gouded away,
creating channels that form the outline of
the design, and that are filled with the enamel
powder.
Jade
Arts
 ?The
material jade is actually made up of two different
kinds of stone. The most widespread mineral
is nephrite, a variety of the mineral actinolite
and a silicate of calcium and magnesium. It
is composed of fibrous intertwinned crystals.
The other, more precious but less used mineral
is the pyroxene jadeite, a material composed
of interlocking and very compact crystals.
The tough character of jade made it even stronger
than steel and was one reason for its widespread
use in early civilizations in Europe, Far-East
and Meso-America. Besides its toughness, the
smoothness of the stone and the broad range
of colors made it very attractive to early
artisans and artists. The basic jade's colors
are white and a colorless opaqueness. Inclusions
of different metals give it the most beautiful
colors: chromium makes it emerald green ("Imperial
Jade"), iron makes it brown and green,
manganese creates violet colors. Calcium inclusions
give it many different colors like white,
apple green, red, brown and even blue. It
can be cut and shaped with sandstone, slate
and quartz sand on lathes with tools of bronze
or iron. Finally, the pure sound of jade stones
made it a very important idiophone musical
instrument.
 Chinese
Jade comes from the most western point of
China in today Xinjiang (Khotan, Yarkand).
Since the 18th century, the qualitatively
better jade from Burma was introduced. Neolithic
artisans used to shape the stones to axes,
knives and animals. A typical Chinese shape
for jade objects are emblems like a ring  called
huan h, a half-ring pendant named
huang , axes called yue
X, fu or chan P and
a disk called bi . Sacrificial
and religious character are best seen in pieces
called han H that have the shape
of a cicada and were put in the mouth (han
means "containing") of a deceased
person. The other is a hollow cylinder called
cong . It symbolized heaven (the
round inner hole) and earth (the quadrangular
outer shape). Jade objects belonged to the
symbols that the ruling elite used to prove
their relationship to heaven. Hardness, durability
and beauty of the jade stones had to be imitated
by the noble man.
Jade fakes on the market are produced from
serpentine which is not as hard as the real
jade. The expensive and beautiful emerald
green jade is faked by dyeing colorless pieces
or even by producing pieces from heavy lead
glass.
The Chinese character for jade yu
is the picture of three pieces of jade
bound together.
Pottery
and Porcelain
The porcelain of China is most famous in the
world. The making of porcelain has a long
and brilliant history in China.
 In
the development History of Pottery and Porcelain
(Taoci) of China, Tao (pottery) appeared first,
Ci (porcelain) came next, and porcelain was
born out of pottery. Our country's ceramic
history can be traced back to the neolithic
age. Along with the development of ceramics, in
the early period of the Yin and Shang dynasties,
white pottery wares taking porcelain clay
as raw material and hard pottery with printed
lines with a firing temperature as high as
1200 appeared, and the transition from pottery
to porcelain began, resulting in the primitive
blue china. When the early blue china developed
to the Eastern Han Dynasty, its molding was
done with fast wheel throwing, and then the
bottom of the utensil was bonded to the main
body. The shape of the utensil was neat and
regular, the surface was slick, the glaze
was thicker, and the combination technique
of the padding and the glaze was much improved,
so, the primitive blue china began to get
out of its primitive state and enter the mature
stage of blue china.
 In
the Eastern Han Dynasty, the Yue Kiln in Zhejiang
turned out mature blue china products, marking
the maturation of the porcelain industry of
our country. At that time, there were pristine
ceramic whiteware products, too. The Wei,
Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties (220-581)
could be said to be the beginning stage of
porcelain history in China, when blue china
prevailed everywhere, and the production regions
further expanded, but we have also discovered
a small quantity of black vitreous enamel
and ceramic whiteware. In this period, the
society was in an unrest, with continual chaos
caused by war, and amalgamation of nationalities
and introduction of Buddhism promoted the
diversification of ceramic art in style.
In the late North Song Dynasty, the successful
making of ceramic whiteware marked a new milestone
in the porcelain history of China. In the
middle of the Sui and Tang dynasties (581-907),
China flourished unprecedentedly in politics,
economy, culture, and commercial trade, which
boosted the progress of the porcelain industry
and the expansion of the porcelain market,
forming the pattern of "Blue China in
the South and White China in the North".
In the south, blue china was the main product,
with the most typical representative being
the Yue Kiln type. The porcelain body was
light, thin and dense, the glaze was glittering
and fine, representing a very high accomplishment
in porcelain art. The ceramic whiteware produced
by the Xing Kiln of the Tang Dynasty was the
representative of the so-called "white
china in the North". In the middle and
late Tang Dynasty, the technology of both
blue china and white china became further
mature: The successful making of black, yellow
and colored china, and the appearance of the
decorative porcelain represented by the Changsha
Kiln of the Tang Dynasty and the blue-and-white
china of the Tang Dynasty, broke the simple
contrast between "the blue china in the
south" and "white china in the north".
And, from the end of the Tang Dynasty, a situation
of many varieties vying with each other appeared
in the porcelain history of China.
 The
Song Dynasty (960-1279) was the third boom
period after the Han and the Tang dynasties,
when porcelain kilns were everywhere in the
country, with a strong provincial character.
The kilns then can be summed up in "Six
Major Kiln Types" and "Five Famous
Kilns". The "Six Major Kiln Types"
refers to the Dingyao-type, Junyao-type, Yaozhou-type,
and Cizhou-type of the north, and Longquan
blue china type and Jingdezhen greenish white
porcelain type of the south. "Five Famous
Kilns" refers to the Official Kiln, Ru
Kiln, Ge Kiln, Ding Kiln and Jun Kiln. In
the Southern and Northern Song Dynasties,
the official kiln system was basically established, and
the stoneware coming out of the official kiln
developed its unique artistic style different
from the chinaware out of folk kilns. The
porcelain town Jingdezhen rose in the Yuan
Dynasty, and it became famous with its Kraakporselein,
underglaze red porcelain and egg white glazed
porcelain.
 After
development of thousands of years, China's
ceramic art took on a very splendid scene
in the Ming and Qing dynasties, with all kinds
of products of ceramic art blazing with each
other. Decorative porcelain represented by
Kraakporselein began to flourish: Five-colored
wares, Doucai wares (wares with contrasting
colors), Susancai (tricolored glazed pottery
with plain design), glazed three-colored wares,
color enamels, pink-colored wares and so on.
The decorative porcelain wares of the Ming
and Qing dynasties have gathered the best
accomplishments of ceramic art, full of great
artistic appeal. The production of colored
vitreous enamel reached a very high technical
level, and new varieties of one-glaze ware
came out continually: Jilan (sky blue) glaze,
Jihong (ceremonial red) glaze, Langyaohong
(Langyao type red) glaze, cowpea red glaze,
yellow glaze, malachite green glaze and so
on. There were also some breakthroughs in
the manufacturing technique of porcelain:
the pottery turning lathe and knife were used
instead of the bamboo knife and biscuit throwing,
and the blowing glaze technique began to appear,
so, both quality and quantity of porcelain
leaped up sharply. The porcelain industry
of the Ming and Qing dynasties was the peak
of porcelain ware development history of China.
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