Chinese Mandarin Court Necklace Restoration Project
Introduction
In 2007 when we were just getting the blog started, one of the first pieces I photographed for Susan was a Mandarin Court Necklace. There are two things that I remember the most. The first was trying to figure out how to lay out a very large and complicated piece to illustrate it to its best advantage. The second was how different it was from the other pieces in the collection.
When Susan wrote in the post, “The Mandarin Court Necklace is the goal of the serious collector. Legend has it that the Court necklace was patterned after a mala (a string of Tibetan prayer beads) that were given to Emperor Shunzhi (1644-1661) as a gift from the Dalai Lama,” I really understood why.
