What is a Bloodstone?

Bloodstone is s type of stone consisting cinnabar in it. It gets this name mainly because of the color. It is formed when the cinnabar penetrated into the dickite or kaonilite and combined, which is very rare either in or outside China.

Bloodstone, together with Qingtian Stone, Shoushan Stone and Balin Stone are called “Four Domestic stones”. Each of them is suitable to be made into stamps or engraving materials. Bloodstone alone has especially made great contribution to Chinese stamp culture and a bloodstone carving developed into an individual genre that is famous for its magnificent and exquisite culture. In ancient times, Chinese scholars and officials prefer using bloodstone to make stamps. Nowadays they are often seen as stretch bracelet or necklace pendants. Limited by the quantity of production, its price remains high in the market.

When choosing the bloodstone, there are usually 3 standards for your reference. First and the most important one is the “blood”. In terms of “blood”, there are another three standards including the color, quantity and shape of it. Scarlet red is the best and dark one is worst because people believe the scarlet red are like “alive blood” while dark red is “dead”. As for the quantity, normally the more the red part accounts of, the better. However, if there are too much, for example, the whole stone is in red color, that is a cinnabar instead of bloodstone. And concerning the shape, after a stamp is made out of the bloodstone, if all the six sides contains red part, that’s the best and if it only contains one side, that’s the worst. Or if it appears to be images, the value increases a lot.

The second and third criteria are the quality of the stone and the part without red. If there is no crack or other flaws while the stone is translucent and soft, it will be regarded as high quality bloodstone.