Exceptional pieces of jade from the Qing imperial collection, now in the collections of The Fitzwilliam Museum. These jades were carved during the reign of the Emperor Qianlong (r.1736-96), and their materials would have been mined and carefully shipped to Beijing to be carved in the imperial workshop. Some of the pieces on display bear poems composed by the Emperor himself emphasizing the important status of jade in Chinese art and culture.The pieces on display illuminate the different features of Qing dynasty jade carving, including the fashion for copying ancient objects, particularly bronzes, and the technique of carving a two-dimensional landscape with figures onto a three dimensional jade. On view Thu 1 May 2008 to Sun 29 June 2008.History of the CollectionsFew museums in the world contain on a single site collections of such variety and depth. Writing in his Foreword to the catalogue of the exhibition for Treasures from the Fitzwilliam which toured the United States in 1989-90, the then Director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, wrote that "like the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam addresses the history of culture in terms of the visual forms it has assumed, but it does so from the highly selective point of view of the collector connoisseur. Works of art have been taken into the collection not only for the historical information they reveal, but for their beauty, excellent quality, and rarity... It is a widely held opinion that the Fitzwilliam is the finest small museum in Europe".