Not all flowers were made of expensive ‘Hetian’ jade which is found in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, in the old days called Turkistan. Another type of jade which was sometimes used, is the much cheaper Xiu yu jade (see also Quick Find 7950). We noticed that the artisans on a few occasions did not pay as much attention to the quality of their flowers when the material did not come from Hetian. A nice example is this rosette which looks a little bit like a rush job. Nevertheless it also dates from the Ming period (1368 – 1644). A similar type of flower in jade (nr 2) is depicted in professor Cheng Te-k’un’s book ‘Jade Flowers and Floral Patterns in Chinese Decorative Art’。