Jade cat pendant: the lucky cat seated, one paw raised beside the ear, carved in the round in a pale blue green stone. Braided brown cord and red bead.
This cat is Japanese, not Chinese: it appears in Tokyo in the nineteenth century and spread through Asia in the twentieth. A recent borrowing, and the page says so.
The length is set by a sliding knot. The stone unties, so it weighs: the record will be published. Why I write it down.
A jade cat pendant: the lucky cat seated, one paw raised beside the ear, carved in the round in a pale, slightly blue green stone. The collar and the bell are taken up with the burin. It is knotted to a braided brown cord, under a red bead.
In four lines
The lucky cat seated, paw raised, carved in the round.
Collar and bell taken up with the burin, muzzle and whiskers engraved.
Pale blue green, adjustable length by sliding knot.
The record will be published: the stone unties, so it weighs.
This cat is not Chinese
It is worth saying plainly in a jade shop: the cat with the raised paw is Japanese. It is called maneki-neko, the beckoning cat, and its appearance is dated to the end of the Edo period, in the nineteenth century. It has no root in the Chinese tradition of jade.
It spread through China and the whole of Asia in the twentieth century, to the point where you find one at the door of every other shop, and it is now carved in every material, jade included. It is a recent borrowing, not an old tradition, and a page that presented it otherwise would be talking nonsense.
That takes nothing away from the piece. It only changes what can be said about it: a likeable object, readable anywhere, not a thousand year old inheritance.
The raised paw, and which one
The commonest convention has it that the left paw raised calls in visitors and the right one money. This one raises its left paw, the one on your right as it faces you.
That rule is far from fixed: depending on the region of Japan, the shop and the period, both readings turn up reversed, and there are cats with two paws raised. I report it as a custom, not as a code.
The work on the subject, though, is clean: the ears stand clear of the skull, the collar forms a continuous ridge round the neck, the bell is a small sphere in relief, and the whiskers are engraved in fine strokes on either side of the muzzle. For a piece this size, that is a great deal of detail.
A pale stone, and what remains to be established
The green is pale and slightly blue, with a milky look that softens the edges of the carving. On that kind of tone the weighing is less decisive than on a deep green: dolomitic marble, sold under the name white jade, reaches 2.85 while nephrite starts at 2.90.
Serpentine, around 2.6, and quartzite, around 2.65, on the other hand separate out without difficulty. The measurement is possible here since the knot undoes and the stone weighs bare.
Outside Burma, country of extraction not confirmed
What tradition attributes to the lucky cat and to jade
What follows changes register, and I flag it rather than blending it into the rest of the page. Nothing here is demonstrated. These are customs and beliefs, which I report because they are part of the history of this stone. No piece in this shop is sold as a remedy, and I claim no effect for this one.
A nineteenth century inventionThe maneki-neko appears in Tokyo at the end of the Edo period. Several temples claim its origin, each with its legend of a cat that saved a lord from a storm. Those stories come after the figurine, not before it.
The paw that callsThe gesture copies the Japanese way of beckoning, palm down. A Westerner reads it as a wave, which is an amusing and very common misreading. Left paw for visitors, right paw for money, says the most frequent usage.
A borrowing, and a recent oneThis cat has no root in the Chinese tradition of jade, where the carved animals are the pixiu, the bat, the fish or the three legged toad. It settled there in the twentieth century, through trade.
A stone of moral virtueIn Confucian thought, jade is associated with qualities of character rather than effects on the body: uprightness, constancy, restraint. It is the best documented meaning of them all.
Dispatched within 48 hours of your order being confirmed, for delivery within 14 days from dispatch. I keep no buffer stock, and I won’t promise a timeframe I couldn’t meet.
Postage charges
€6.99 to any destination, free on orders of €47 or more to France, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The exact amount appears in the cart before you pay.
The packaging, and why it matters
Every piece ships in its own pouch, kept apart from the others. This isn’t about presentation: the hardness of jade is ordinary, between 6 and 6.5 for nephrite and 6.5 to 7 for jadeite, and the quartz in everyday dust sits at 7. Two pieces of jewellery that travel together end up scratching each other.
Fourteen days to change your mind
With no need to explain yourself. An email is enough to open a return, there is no form to fill in. Return postage is at your expense, unless the piece doesn’t match its listing or arrives damaged.
Warm water, mild soap, a soft cloth. A very soft brush for the hollows of a carving. That’s all, and it’s enough.
What you must never do, and why
No ultrasonic cleaner, no steam, no solvent, no heat source. This isn’t a token precaution: the treatment status of my pieces is not established. My supplier doesn’t know, and weighing establishes the mineral without saying anything about a possible resin impregnation. Resin tolerates neither heat nor solvents, so every piece is handled as though it might contain some. The information sheet on treatments.
Scratches, and where they come from
Jade is tough, meaning very hard to break: its interlocking crystal structure resists fracturing, and that is why axes could be shaped from it in the Neolithic. Its hardness, on the other hand, is ordinary, 6 to 6.5 for nephrite and 6.5 to 7 for jadeite. The quartz in everyday dust sits at 7: that is what dulls jade, not knocks. The difference between the two.
Day to day
Put the piece on after perfume and cream, never before. Take it off for housework, gardening and sport, where the knocks against corners happen. Store each piece on its own, in its pouch. On a strand of beads, the thread wears out before the stone: it gets restrung, and there is nothing abnormal about that.
My name is Jade. I’m French, from Morbihan, and based in Tallinn. I choose the pieces and have them set: I mine nothing, I cut nothing, and I don’t do the metalwork myself. The work I do is the sorting, and with this material that is what decides everything.
I am neither a gemmologist, nor a lapidary, nor a therapist, and I don’t claim to be.
I weigh, I don’t certify
Before putting a reference online, I order one example of it for myself. When it reaches me unset, I weigh it in air, then suspended from a thread in a glass of water: the ratio of the two masses gives the density, and that figure separates jadeite, nephrite, serpentine and dyed quartzite without ambiguity.
One example per reference, not every piece. I don’t handle the piece that goes out to you, and I would rather say so than let you believe otherwise. The method, with its three limits.
What I can’t know
The treatment status of my pieces. My supplier doesn’t know, and the scales say nothing about it: they establish the mineral, not the resin impregnation. Only infrared spectroscopy in a laboratory would settle it, and I don’t have that done. So you will never read “jadeite A”, “type A” or “untreated” on this site. The information sheet.
Where my jade comes from
No Burmese jadeite, and the first reason is a legal one. Not the reason you read everywhere: the JADE Act of 2008 did indeed ban these stones in the United States, but that ban was lifted on 7 October 2016. What applies today dates from 8 April 2021: the US Treasury sanctioned Myanma Gems Enterprise, the state-owned company that controls the Burmese gem trade. So there is no general ban, but an American is not allowed to trade with that entity, and a stone never tells you where it has passed through. One single supply chain for ten markets: it has to hold up for the most demanding of them. When an origin isn’t confirmed to me in writing, the listing doesn’t state it. My sourcing policy.
