dublinka

This is the beautiful cover of The Song of the Jade Bowl, a poem by the Emperor Qianlong from AD 1745. The entire stone book, which you can see at the Chester Beaty library Dublin, is worked in Chinese jade/nephrite and gold. At that time Jade was considered pretty indestructible, so any thoughts that an Emperor wanted to preserve, were carved into such books. I had a look at it today, and the pages are really quite amazing. An English translation of the poem has been done but I haven't been able to track it down. Yet!