Chinese Bamboo Carving

Bamboo, pine and plum, called the "three good friends in the cold years," have always been popular among people, including poets, artists and handicraftsmen. The common bamboo gives a sense of transcendent beauty, and collecting bamboo carvings has been the hobby of Chinese people for a long time.

China was one of the first nations to use bamboo. Archeologists once unearthed a painted dragon-pattern bamboo spoon from the Western Han Dynasty (206BC-AD24) at the No 1 Han tomb of Changsha Mawangdui in Hunan Province. From this, we can see that as early as 2,000 years ago people carved bamboo into elaborate utensils.

Very few bamboo carvings pre-dated the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), but mid-Ming-Dynasty bamboo carvings have become a professional industrial art, and more and more artists have taken it up, shifting its role from practical use into an art form. Jiading and Jinling areas that teemed with bamboo were the two bamboo-carving centers during the Ming and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties.