Chinese Bead Curtains, Past and Present
CHINESE BEAD CURTAINS, PAST AND PRESENT Valerie Hector Relatively little is known about how beads were combined to form are generally affixed to architectural structures, often to larger structures in China. To address this situation, this paper the frames of doors or windows, where they serve several focuses on Chinese bead curtains. Adopting an approach that is purposes simultaneously. They embellish openings in the broad rather than deep and empirical rather than theoretical, it facade of a building, especially doorways and, to a lesser collates evidence from the textual, material, oral, and pictorial extent, windows. Usually, the bead curtain spans the height records to consider bead curtains from various perspectives. To of the opening or most of it. Bead curtains also accentuate begin, this study defines bead curtains as textiles, door and window boundaries, distinguishing public and private realms or ornaments, screens, and types of beadwork. It then discusses bead defining interior spaces. curtains of the imperial era (221 B.C.-A.D. 1911) as they are referenced in the Chinese textual record from the 4th century on. A In China, the bead curtains that hang in doorways belong discussion of bead curtains of the post-imperial era (1912-present) to a broader category of door- and window-frame ornaments. follows, offering a small database of 20th- and 21st-centuries While some of these are talismanic, part of a cultural system examples composed of organic and inorganic bead materials. of attracting positive and repelling negative influences, it is While contemporary, commercially-produced Chinese bead not clear that bead curtains can be called talismanic.
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