I am sorry for pushing this, but it is a fascinating question for me. The only Chinese blades with a facetted tip seem to be in Japan, and then there is the one from this thread that was restored to show the faceting. What did it look like before the restoration? I went back through the HOS pictures of bronze swords, which are in good enough condition and well photographed enough to show a faceted tip but could not find any. There are good Tibetan blades going back 500 years without any change in style, and then there are these 2000-year-old bronze blades that are still in roughly the same form. I know little of the intervening 1500 years. Thomas Chen's website describes the Tang and Sui swords in Japanese collections as probably from China, but they also could have been polished in a Japanese style.
One of the characteristics of Chinese swords is that many styles of many periods can be found coexisting, but they all seem to have lost the faceted tip if they ever had one. Such tips are not in my understanding found on typical swords of the Qing, Ming, Yuan or Song dynasties. They are certainly not visible in art from those periods that I have examined, and they are not found on antique examples done in those styles. (i.e. not necessarily dated to a particular dynasty but in the style of the dynasty).
I am not at all saying that such tips could not have existed. There are records of many Japanese blades ending up in China, and I have seen pictures of some possible examples that do not show faceted tips. So clearly Japanese blades would have had them, but maybe they lost their faceting? Would all of the Chinese blades also have lost their faceting? I would really like to see what the jian tip shown as an example in this thread looked like before restoration. Maybe I simply don't see faceting where others can. I have seen angled points like those shown, just not the distinct separate tip as found on Japanese swords. If such tips are there, it wouldn't be the first time I have had to learn to see something.
Josh
|