Although practiced for centuries, Chinese glass-making gained prominence during the Qing-dynasty with the introduction of Peking glass. Originally used for the production of snuff bottles, a favored imperial gift, Peking glass has origins in the Kangxi period (1662-1722), when the Emperor first established a glassmaking workshop in the imperial palace in Beijing.

Adapting Italian glass techniques, glassmakers developed a type of glass that was uniquely thick and opaque, the ideal medium for intricately-carved glass objects that mimicked the translucency of jade, semiprecious stones and rare jewels. By the mid-18th century, under the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, the complex art form had extended beyond the imperial workshops and China had entered the golden era of Peking glass.

Similar to the process of making cameo glass, sculptural vases, bowls and snuff bottles were created by dipping a blown-glass form in molten glass to achieve depth and multicolored layers. The outermost glass was then carved away to reveal the inner layers, creating a bas-relief surface design in high-contrast colors.

Through experimentation, artists were able to produce a wide array of vibrant colors, utilizing many of the same pigments found in ceramic glazes, such as colloidal gold for shades of red, pink and purple, cadmium for yellows and orange, and cobalt for deep blues.

Several classic color profiles stand out among the endless combinations. One of the most common is a two-color design of translucent jewel tones against an opaque white field, known as “green-cut-to-white” or “red-cut-to-clear,” and so on.

Multicolor designs were also abundant, such as figures & charms sculpted from molten glass or forms carved through multiple layers of colored glass, suggestive of five-color (wucai 五彩) porcelain of blue underglaze and red, green and yellow overglaze enamels.

Perhaps the most popular of all were forms created with a single shade of brilliant, opaque yellow glass, known as “imperial yellow” after the golden-yellow flag of the Qing dynasty. The rich & glossy color is also known by collectors as “canary yellow,” “egg-yolk yellow” and “chicken-fat yellow.”

Though multicolor designs of two or more colors were popular throughout the later Qing-dynasty (1644-1911), artists also created Peking glass forms in a single, statement-making color. Whether carved in relief or left undecorated, these opaque glass forms were favored for their saturated color and refined simplicity, placing emphasis on the vessel’s silhouette in the longstanding tradition of Chinese monochrome porcelain.

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