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The Oriental Shop

The Oriental Shop imports all types of fine porcelain and furniture from China. To get the Far East Look in your own home, take a tour at the Oriental shop.

Silk

The history of the silkworm, which is also the story of silk, goes back to ancient times in China. Some of the stories have been handed down through the generations and are probably based party on fact and partly on legend and myth. The tale which persists is that about 2,640 B.C. a Chinese empress, Si-Ling-Chi, was watching the glistening amber cocoons that little worms were spinning in the mulberry trees in the palace gardens. She unwound one of the threads on a cocoon and found that it was one, very long strand of shiny material. Fascinated, she pulled strands from several cocoons through her ring to form a thicker thread. Eventually, with the help of her ladies of the court, she spun the threads into a beautiful piece of cloth to make a robe for the emperor, Huang-Ti. This magnificent material, silk, became known at the "cloth of kings". 

For thousand of years on the royal family of China had silk. The Chinese kept the secret of how silk was made for 2500 years. The material was sold to the rulers of the West, but the source of the shiny thread that made the material was not revealed. The penalty in China for telling that the silk came from the cocoons of the little silkworms was death! 

Tea

China is the homeland of tea. It is believed that China has tea-shrubs as early as five to six thousand years ago, and human cultivation of teaplants dates back two thousand years. 

1) Green tea: Green tea is the variety which keeps the original colour of the tea leaves without fermentation during processing. This category consists mainly of Longjing tea of Zhejiang Province, Maofeng of Huangshan Mountain in Anhui Province and Biluochun produced in Jiangsu. 

2) Black tea: Black tea, known as "red tea" (hong cha) in China, is the category which is fermented before baking; it is a later variety developed on the basis of the green tea. The best brands of black tea are Qihong of Anhui , Dianhong of Yunnan, Suhong of Jiangsu, Chuanhong of Sichuan and Huhong of Hunan. 

3) Wulong tea: This represents a variety half way between the green and the black teas, being made after partial fermentation. It is a specialty from the provinces on China's southeast coast: Fujian, Guangdong and Taiwan. 

4) Compressed tea: This is the kind of tea which is compressed and hardened into a certain shape. It is good for transport and storage and is mainly supplied to the ethnic minorities living in the border areas of the country. As compressed tea is black in colour in its commercial form, so it is also known in China as "black tea". Most of the compressed tea is in the form of bricks; it is, therefore, generally called "brick tea", though it is sometimes also in the form of cakes and bowls. It is mainly produced in Hubei, Hunan, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. 

5) Scented tea: This kind of tea is made by mixing fragrant flowers in the tea leaves in the course of processing. The flowers commonly used for this purpose are jasmine and magnolia among others. Jasmine tea is a well-known favourite with the northerners of China and with a growing number of foreigners.

Ornaments

China has a wide variety of arts and crafts with exqui-site workmanship. They can be classified into special and folk types. 

Stone carving is created using various rare types of stone, such as the Shoushan Stone and Tianhuang Stone. 

Carved lacquerware, shaped like bottles, pots and large screens, is created out of pure lacquer. Usually bright red, it is classically elegant and beautiful. 

Cloisonne is a kind of handicraft well known at home and abroad. The blue glaze produced during the reign of Emperor Jingtai of the Ming Dynasty is considered the best. Created by mounting copper strips and plating gold and silver on the surface of a copper roughcast, it looks resplendent and magnificent. The products include bottles, bowls, and cups used as prizes, etc. 

Chinese folk arts, with a broad mass foundation as well as a long history, contain profound cultural and historical connotations. They can stimulate people’s aesthetic sense and appreciative taste. Throughout the ages, Chinese folk arts have had a strong local flavour as well as a national style, different in postures and beautiful beyond appreciation. 

In technique, Chinese folk arts fall into the categories of cutting, bundling, plaiting, knitting, embroidering, carving, moulding and painting. 

Cutting includes papercuts, paperengravings, papercut silhouettes, paperfolding, paper sculpture, and leather-silhouettes, all of which evolved from papercuts. 

Bundling includes kites and colour lanterns bundled up with paper, silk or bamboo. 

Plaiting, a popular folk art, includes various straw or thread plaited articles. The products include cloth tigers, cool pillows, cushions, tiny fragrant bags, colour silk balls, shoe-pads, and velvet flowers and birds. 

Knitting, including wax printing, bandhnu, colour printing, drawn work and flower knitting, is created by weaving, knitting or stitching. 

Embroidering includes picture weaving in silk, printing and dyeing. China’s four famous styles of embroidery are those of Suzhou, Hunan, Guangdong and Sichuan. 

Carving includes art depictions of various shapes, such as masks, puppet heads, figures, animals and flowers, which are created with bamboo, wood, jade, or horn. 

Moulding includes dough modelling, clay sculpture, frozen butter sculpture and pottery sculpture. The products serve not only as ornaments but also as children’s toys. 

Painting involves such techniques as hand painting, incision, patchwork, and pyrograph, each having a style of its own. 

China is the home of chinaware, porcelain being produced in both the south and north. Famous porcelain-making centers are Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Province and Liling in Hunan Province in the south and Tangshan and Handan in Hebei Province and Zibo in Shandong Province. The long-lost techniques of the celebrated ancient porcelain kilns such as Longquan, Jun, Ru, Guan, Cizhou and Yaozhou have now been recovered, “like old trees putting forth new blossoms” as the saying goes. The purplish brown sandy potteries of Yixing, the noted pottery centre in Jiangsu Province, are much sought after for their classic elegance and splendid luster. 

Made in China

Paper and ink, gunpowder, canal gates, the camera obscura, the magnetic compass and printing were all early Chinese inventions. 

Even while the Warring States were battling it out, philosophers travelled throughout China, spreading new ideas. They were so many that they were known as the Hundred Schools, and they included such profound thinkers as Confucius, Lao-tzu and Zhuang zi. Lao-tzu is said to have written the book on which the Taoist religion is based. 

• Confucius (551-479 bc) believed that humanity was the highest virtue, and his thinking influenced Chinese culture for more than 2000 years.
• Spinning silk According to legend, the Chinese discovered how to get silk from silk worms in 2640 bc.