Ivory sculpture is an old art in China dating back to prehistoric times. From the ruins of the Yin Dynasty capital of 3,700 years ago knives and rulers made of ivory have been unearthed and the writing record of the jade articles can be found in the history document of the Warring States. As an art, ivory carving calls for meticulous care. The varying shapes and sizes and the position of hard core of the tusks must be taken into careful consideration together with the carver’s own specialties, when he conceives the work he is gong to produce. Normally, he will first hew out a rough shape before using his finer tools for the final chiseling and polishing of detail. For larger jobs a clay model will be moulded and found to be satisfactory before the ivory is worked on. A very large and complex piece of work comprises a number of parts sculptured separately and then assembled.

The Beijing Arts and Crafts Factory turned out in 1974 a large ivory sculpture entitled “ the Chengdu-Kunming Railway”. Measuring 180 cm long, 64 cm wide and 110 cm high (including the base) and weighing 318 kilograms, it took 5,000 work-days to complete. Rich in national flavor, it was presented to, and is now displayed at, the United Nations Headquarters.

A gem in the art of ivory carving is the “latticed balls within balls”, which has a history of barely a hundred years. To create this marvel, the master craftsman first shapes a piece of ivory into a perfect spherical ball and then bores through it at suitable intervals several conical holes, whose apexes meet exactly at the center of the hall. Next, he marks the inside of each hole with lines to indicate the number of balls to be cut out. Only now is the ready to cut the balls of different layers, starting with the innermost. In spite of the holes, he cannot see any thin but have to work by feels, relying on his years of experience and on a fine carver with a curved blade. The rest of the balls are cut out and carved successively from the inside out. Throughout the whole operation, any hair-thin mistake would ruin the entire work of art.

Up to the time of writing, the most complicated “latticed balls within balls” has been produced by the Daxing Ivory Factory of Guangzhou. Weng Rongbiao, a veteran master craftsman there, cut in 1977, out of an ivory block 15 cm across, asset of 42 latticed halls -on inside another, each ball movable inside its larger sphere and bearing pierced work of landscape (pavilions and towers, clouds and mountains). And the innermost ball is as thin as paper!

Weng Rongbiao is from a family of four generations of ivory -ball carvers. As early as 1915, his father won international recognition at the International Fair in Panama with a set of “25 latticed balls within balls” carved out of ivory.