The Jade Culture Of The Radical Of “玉”in Shuo Wen Jie Zi

The section Shuo Wen:Jade has a main body of126characters and17variant characters. The huge amount of character families reflected the whole evolution process of Jade (as a radical character), from Oracle to inscriptions on ancient bronze objects and finally to small seal script. At the same time, the narration of characters with Jade as the radical made by Xu Shen revealed abundant ancient cultural information on jade and Chinese traditional cultural spirit, which can be seen as living fossils through which we could pry into Chinese jade culture.In this paper, the author would try humbly to study characters with Jade as the radical. Rational classifications of the characters in the summary part of the section about jade according to the names, types and uses would be made, relying on ancient Chinese jade culture, through analyses word by word and interior textual research. The development period of the jade culture would be revealed by means of cultural interpretation on characters meaning Li Yu (Ritual Jade), Rui Yu (propitious jade), and Pei Yu(jade wear by baron). That is to say, the features of jade application in terms of royalties, politics, military affairs, foreign affairs, sacrifices, funerals, and decorations, etc. in different historical period would be revealed. On this basis, a further explanation of the status of jade culture in traditional Chinese culture would be made, and its influences on ancient Chinese’ views and vales would be demonstrated. With the development of the society, men of literature and writing had added new cultural connotations to jade, i.e. standard social ethics and moral. What’s more, character families concerning jade in the latter literary works also reflected the unique cognitive thinking, aesthetic psychology and value orientation of Han Chinese because of their abundant metaphorical meaning.