My Jin Shi Jian (With Pictures!!!)

lol I doubt I'll be doing any cutting with it any time soon, but its sharp as hell.

Seems alot of us are either waiting for or considering one of these beautiful blades, I am seriously considering one much the same as yours only shorter and lighter and with a wooden handle and scabbard with a shiny dark green lacquer.

You bugger violent, you want everything of mine! I'm kidding, it is just such a beautiful looking piece and with the dark green lacquer would be so gorgeous, just need to get my money situation sorted out and sell one of my pieces *hint hint Violent*

Got a link to the page? Or do you think he'd mind if a few more of us were to look at his past work?

You mean the Green Dragon Jian?

I'm having trouble telling the different styles of Jian apart, honestly. Even with the link that (I think) sirtre gave me in the other thread, I don't understand what, specifically, sets a Tang jian apart from a Han Jian from a Qing Jian from a Qing or Mingor Yuan or...
Can anyone actually help me with that?

The fittings in the early Han period is the pommel discs, scabbard chape and slide. The fittings characteristic is eerily similar to late Roman spatha and viking period swords. Later Han imperial swords/dao replaces the pommel and with a pommel ring and introduced the with rayskin/samegawa on their handle (sounds familiar eh ) In fact even during the late Han dynasty, the dao/to have the chisel shaped kiriha zukuri kissaki similar to Japanese chukuto. The swords used by imperial guards where called yi-dao (if I am not mistaken).

By the tang dynasty, the ring pommel is discontinued (rayskin remained) and they introduce (perhaps earlier) the tunkou (habaki/sword collar) with fittings on the scabbard chape and pommel in some sense similar to a Japanese tachi fittings of kojiri and kashira. The tang dynasty dao also have decorative fittings which is known as menuki and the lanyard is replaced with a mekugi.

Basically my 2 cents of my crappy history on Chinese swords

Nono, were talking about custom designing a jian from Garrett. The design would be the same as the Tang Dynasty jian, but instead of the wood handle and scabbard we were looking at having it laquered like the green dragon jian.

Taran, what my limited understanding is, is that it's simply different style of fittings were used for Jian during the different time periods. If I'm not mistaken (please feel free to correct me here, as I'm not certain on this) I think it was sometime in the Song dynasty the the single handed Jian became more common than the two handed version, although the Jian lost dominance to the Dao as the main battlefield weapon in the late Han dynasty.

It's ebony, I originally was considering having it for my sword, but Garrett told me it didn't react very well to the length of the blade I'd be getting, so I opted to have a different wood (rosewood, I think?) laquered in a textured black.