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Eagle decorated golden crown top and golden crown belt of the Warring States Period.

The major methods for processing fold articles originated from bronze making, which include smelting, mould founding, hammering, welding, bead-forming, engraving, wire-twining, wire inlay, etc., but developed or innovated. Take the bead-forming craft for example. It is an art unique to gold processing in which the first step is to let melted gold drip into warm water drop by drop to form beads of various sizes, and then by welding each tiny drop of gold, fish-egg patterns or bead-string patterns are made. Silverware turned up later than gold, and followed gold articles in working procedures.

From the very beginning gold and silver articles came out as artworks. The existing earliest gold objects were made in the Shang Dynasty more than 3,000 years ago. They were mostly ornaments, simple in shape, small in size, with less decorative patterns. The Shang-dynasty gold articles were chiefly gold and silver foil, gold leaves and sheets, used to adorn utensils; only a few in the northern and northwestern regions were used for personal adornment. Of the earlier gold articles, the gold masks and the gold staffs unearthed from the early Shu-culture ruins in Sanxingdui of Guanghan, Sichuan Province, are the most eye-catching. In the Shang and Zhou dynasties, the bronze techniques and the jade carving both facilitated the growth of gold and silver crafts.
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Ming Dynasty brush pot, housed in Nanjing Museum.

Bamboo carving means to carve various ornamental patterns or characters on bamboo items, or make ornaments from bamboo roots by carving. China is the first country in the world using bamboo articles. The extant bamboo carving item early in age is the painted lacquer bamboo ladle unearthed from the Western Han Tombs No. 1 in Mawangdui of Changsha. Decorated with dragon and braids designs using bas-relief and fretwork techniques, it is a highly finished rarity.
Since the mid-Ming Dynasty, bamboo carving developed into a special art. At the very beginning, there were only a few well-educated artisans working for bamboo carving. As bamboo was easily available, more and more people started to join in this craft, some by learning from others privately, until bamboo carving became a special line with a great quantity of works left over to posterity. Bamboo joint carving is the representative variety in bamboo carving in which bamboo joints are shaped into brush pots, incense tubes, tea caddies, etc. and then its surface pierced out to make relief sculpture to produce an artistic effect.

The techniques of bamboo carving mainly include keeping green-covering, pasting yellow chips, round carving and inlaying.
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Yuan Dynasty pinch-wire elephant-ear heater, housed in Palace Museum. It is a gold gilded copper coatd with enamel that looks refined and gorgrous.

The enamelware manufacturing craft is actually a complex process combining enamel process and metal process. It is prepared by first grinding quartz, silicon, feldspar, borax, ans some metal minerals into powder ans then melting and then applying on metal utensils to form a surface after backing. Sometimes polishing or gold-plating is needed. Enamelware which has he sturdiness of metal, the smoothness and corrosion-resistance of glass, is practical and beautiful. To date the earliest enamel object made in China is the Tang-dynasty gold-inlaid silver-base enamel mirror now kept in the Shosoin Repository of Nara, Japan. But no other enamelware was found in the three of four hundred years afterwards. In the late years of the

Ming Dynasty pinch-wire enamel bottle, housed in Palace Museum.

Yuan Dynasty, Chinese enamelware became less influenced by Arabian culture and more and more nationalized.

Enamelware includes gold-inlay enamel, coating enamel, painting enamel in terms of processing methods, and gold-base enamel, copper-base enamel, porcelain-base enamel, glass-bass enamel purple-clay enamel, etc. in terms of bases. Among them the copper-base enamel is he most popular, because the copper price is relatively lower, and enamel is easier to adhere to the copper surface. The distinguished traditional Chinese handicraft Jingtailan (cloisonné enamel), its scientific name being copper background wire-inlay enamel, got its name from being made in large quantities in Beijing during the Jingtai Reign of the Ming Dynasty, and the enamel used was mostly of a blue color. The procedure of Jingtailan includes chiefly base-making, wir-inlaying, firing and soldering, blue enamel coating, enamel-baking, polishing, and gold-plating. Coating is done byusing small iron spade or glass tube to apply glaze of different colors first in the background, then on the designs and then finally to the blue glaze and add some shiny white substance. Glazing and baking procedure is done repeatedly, one blazing followed by one backing, often three times are needed for quality cloisonné.
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