William Hazlitt, Essayist and Critic, Selections from His Writings, with a Memoir, Biographical and Critical

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INTRODUCTION The early Chinese believed that jade had an immortality of its own and was impervious to decay. For them there was no substance nobler, purer, more durable, more pre-eminently suitable for the fashioning of religious emblems and the embodiment of dogma. Round jade, as round a kernel, the whole body of early Chinese civilisation crystallised. And yet they were not the first discoverers or users of jade, for the Babylonians made seal cylinders of jade, and Professor Elliott Smith believes that the Turkestan jade mountains and rivers were first worked by miners from Mesopotamia who, passing on legends about the magical qualities of jade, infected the Chinese with their beliefs. From the third millennium he says, the mines on the S.E. of the Caspian were being exploited and contact was established between Babylonians, Elamites, and the population of Turkestan. But however early the contacts, assumed or established, we can state truthfully that the Chinese made jade particularly and everlastingly their own, embodying in it their traditions, their religion, their administrative system. They may have derived their belief in the life-giving properties of jade from the Elamite…