Glass or Liuli: One Character Apart, A Millennium of Ambiguity

Last weekend, I had planned to visit the Aurora Art Museum, only to observe upon arrival that no exhibitions were on. Glancing across the street, I noticed the Aurora Museum was open, with several permanent collections covering ancient Chinese ceramics, jade, porcelain, and Buddhist sculptures. Since I was already there, I bought a ticket and wandered in.

In the jade research gallery, one display case stopped me in my tracks. It held an array of both natural and man-made stones from the same era as the jade pieces—materials used to imitate the look of jade. Agate sat there, perfectly at home. But then a word appeared on a label that made me pause: bōlí (玻璃) — the modern Chinese word for "glass." Several white, blue, and yellow objects from the Warring States period and the Han dynasty lay quietly beneath that label. My first instinct was, shouldn't ancient pieces like these be called liúlí (琉璃)? Could the two words really be interchangeable here?

That small moment of puzzlement turned out to pull at a thread stretching well over two thousand years — a long-running case involving materials, naming, and cultural identity.

Artwork Named as "bōlí" 

Part One: Bōlí — The Latecomer That Won

Today, "bōlí" is an utterly ordinary word—windows, cups, phone screens, all glass. But if you were to travel back to the Han dynasty, walk into a market, and ask a stallkeeper whether they had any bōlí for sale, you would likely be met with a blank stare.

As a word with a stable, independent meaning, "bōlí" didn't fully establish itself in its modern sense until after the Song dynasty. Before that, it appeared occasionally in texts, but its meaning drifted—sometimes referring to transparent gemstones, sometimes serving as an alternate writing of "liúlí"—with no settled semantic territory to call its own.

What gave bōlí its independence was a wave of influence from the West. Maritime trade flourished in the Song dynasty, and large quantities of highly transparent glassware from Persia, the Arab world, and even Europe poured into Chinese markets. These imported objects were strikingly clear—worlds apart from the semi-transparent wares made domestically. The Chinese began deliberately distinguishing between the two: bōlí was reserved for these transparent foreign arrivals; liúlí was returned to the native tradition.

The result was a semantic split based on origin rather than material — in the Song dynasty, bōlí was less a description of a substance than a certificate of foreign provenance.

From a materials science perspective, glass is fundamentally an amorphous solid: its atoms have no regular arrangement or long-range order, formed when a molten mass cools too quickly to crystallize—technically, a kind of "frozen liquid." This definition has nothing to do with composition, color, or transparency. Whether it's window glass, lead crystal, or the lead-barium glass fired by Warring States craftsmen, anything meeting this structural criterion is, by modern scientific standards, unambiguously glass.

Part Two: Liúlí — A Word With a Complicated Past

Liúlí, by comparison, has a history far more convoluted—and far more glamorous.

Its earliest written record appears in the Discourses on Salt and Iron (Yán Tiě Lùn) by Huan Kuan of the Western Han, where it is written as "liúlí" (流离)—two characters that even visually suggest something wandering, something passed from hand to hand across enormous distances. It is a loanword, derived from Sanskrit or an Iranian language, originally denoting a semi-transparent gemstone or vitreous material. As Buddhism spread into China, vaiḍūrya—one of the Seven Treasures of Buddhist scripture—became widely known, and the word liúlí acquired a deep religious and sacred resonance along with it.

Even as this foreign word established itself in the Central Plains, native craftsmen were quietly crafting their own unique creations.

In the middle and late Warring States periods, Chinese artisans absorbed glassmaking techniques from Western Asia and developed an entirely original formula—substituting lead oxide (PbO) and barium oxide (BaO) for the sodium oxide and calcium oxide commonly used in the West. The result was a uniquely Chinese lead-barium glass found almost nowhere else in the ancient world: a genuine original invention in the history of Chinese materials. Craftsmen used it to imitate jade bi discs, sword fittings, and seals. The texture was warm and lustrous, capturing something of jade's spirit — a connoisseur could tell the difference at a glance, of course, but these objects were refined enough to enter the tombs of aristocrats and accompany their owners into the long sleep of eternity.

All of these objects were called "liúlí."

At that time, liúlí was an expansive, unprejudiced word. It encompassed imported Western glass beads and domestically made lead-barium imitation jade alike, both sharing the same name without tension. Across a considerable stretch of Chinese history, terms like "bōlí," "liúlí," "bì liúlí," and "yào yù" ("medicine jade") were used almost interchangeably, their boundaries fluid. To modern eyes this may seem imprecise, but it actually reflects a unified understanding: these were all things made by fire, non-natural, bearing a kind of man-made magic—transparent or translucent—and remarkable for it.

After the Song dynasty, the meaning of "liúlí" slowly became more specific, referring mainly to craft items made in homes. By modern times, it had changed in two ways: first, as fine art pieces made with traditional lead-glass methods (called "gǔfǎ liúlí," or "ancient-method glass"), valued for their handmade quality and beautiful colors; and second, as the glazed roof tiles ("liúlí wǎ") found in traditional buildings—though these are actually lead-glazed ceramics and have moved away from the original meaning of the word.

Part Three: What Should the Museum Label Say?

Back to that display case at the Aurora Museum. The Warring States and Han dynasty imitation jade objects are labeled bōlí—is this scientifically sound?

The answer is yes, but it could be more complete.

From a materials science standpoint, using bōlí is perfectly defensible. Lead-barium glass fully satisfies the modern definition of glass in its structural properties, and labeling it as such allows visitors to immediately understand that they are looking at an artificially fired, amorphous silicate material—no ambiguity there. More importantly, bōlí maps directly onto the standard international archaeological term lead-barium glass, giving it cross-linguistic academic precision.

Yet there is also a case for writing liúlí. A museum label is not merely a materials specification; it also has the function of restoring historical context. The people of the Warring States period called these objects "liúlí," and using the word of their time is, in its own way, a form of respect for history. More to the point, the word "bōlí" had not yet stabilized as a distinct term when these objects were made—labelling an artifact with a word that only solidified in meaning centuries after its creation is, strictly speaking, an anachronism in historical linguistics.

But Liúlí has its pitfalls. In contemporary usage, the word is strongly associated with modern artisan crafts; when today's visitor reads "liúlí," the image that likely comes to mind is a colorful decorative piece in a boutique window, not an imitation jade object excavated from a Warring States nobleman's tomb. A name is a door, and if you walk through the wrong one, the story you tell goes astray.

The most rigorous approach, then, would be a layered label—something like

Lead-barium glass imitation jade bi disc Material: lead-barium glass (historically known as liúlí) Middle to Late Warring States Period

The primary label uses "bōlí" (or more precisely, "lead-barium glass"), with the historical term "liúlí" given in parentheses. This satisfies scientific accuracy, restores the historical context, and incidentally affords visitors a glimpse into the fascinating history of how liúlí and bōlí diverged. A useful museum label should never be just a tag—it should be a window opening onto something deeper.

Part Four: One Character Apart: A Thousand Years of Identity

Looking back across this history, the entanglement of bōlí and liúlí is far more than a matter of vocabulary.

It reflects how a civilization received foreign material and, in the act of absorbing it, created something new. From imported soda-lime glass beads to an entirely original domestic invention in lead-barium glass, Chinese craftsmen were not simply imitating — they were genuinely reinventing the material. This history also records a story of naming itself: when language encounters something new, how do people borrow, reshape, and split words, loading them with ever more complex cultural meaning?

Liúlí was once broad enough to hold everything. Bōlí later reversed the order of arrival and became the language of science. Yet neither word has disappeared — each guards its territory of meaning, serving different purposes in different contexts. When they chance to meet, as they do in a museum display case, they can still make a visitor stop, puzzled and curious for just a moment.

And perhaps that moment of puzzlement is the finest ticket history has to offer.