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Red sandlewood museum (Chinese furniture)
Recently got back from a trip to China and this particular museum in Beijing was one of the highlights of the cultural attractions we visited. I thought I'd share a few photos.
To me this looked like a modern take on the traditional Chinese style folding chair/stool. There is a lot of brass detail and joinery (assuming to reinforce something that looks quite delicate). Those curved arms are something I've grown quite fond of in Chinese furniture and it's always fun to pick out the scarf joints. Some of the examples I saw it was actually very difficult to spot the joint itself but the locking pin usually gives it away.
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There are a series of very large scale models in the museum and according to the signs the joinery in the temple models in particular are accurate to the real thing. Some models had mirrors embedded inside so you could see the roof joinery (not pictured unfortunately).
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Some impressive examples of cabinet making. Most often the brass hinges are featured on the outside and there was a staggering variety of different types of latches and locks.
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There were a lot of reproductions of Ming and Qing dynasty throne furniture. Alot of detail in those carvings
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This cabinet was really interesting. It is red sandlewood inlaid with boxwood for the characters. This is the "thousand word essay?" (I can't quite recall it's history and essay might be the wrong word, but quite famous).
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A particularly nice example of a curved side table. The joinery for the top is quite common, if a little bit more complicated in this curved version, but basically it's 4 sides joined with mortise & tenons and a tongue & groove panel in the center. Some of the larger panels have supports running underneath the panel using mortise & tenons (a few examples I saw the support dovetailed into the panel itself). The older examples of this don't seem to use any glue, they are all wedged through tenons so you could effectively dismantle the entire thing piece by piece and transport/repair it.
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Some of the wood types featured in the museum.
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Small side story: I was surprised to discover a shared interest with one of my partner's uncles who has taken to wood carving in recent years and showed me a few examples of some carvings and turned items (vases & beads) he'd done in ebony (they call it 'black sandlewood'), sandlewood and huanghuali. He usually takes scraps & branches from friends and basically uses every bit he can. The sawdust from sandlewood goes into pouches, the smaller offcuts become beads, dice, or other things of indeterminate purpose but polished up so they are nice to look at and handle. I was expecting a large array of tools, but his carvings were all done with a couple of chisels and an angle grinder that he'd rigged up to take dremel bits. He was also very much against applying any finish to the wood and seemed very keen to show me that the things he made should be handled and smelt. I did pickup that the smell of some of those woods (particularly a carved traditional sandlewood pillow he made) was supposed to have some medicinal purpose and had the bonus side effect of keeping the ever present Guangdong mozzies at bay.
Variety of traditional style beds used by the nobility in Mind & Qing dynasties. Those legs are all 3 way mitred tenons. So much detail in the joinery all hidden away.
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There were very few other places that came close to this museum for examples of wood carving, but I should give an honourable mention to the Chen clan ancestral hall in Guangzhou. I snapped a bunch of photos while we were there, but they didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped. We did also visit an exhibition of Chao Zhou gilded wood carvings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teochew_woodcarving) in the Guangzhou museum... sadly that craft is lost now.
