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Chinese furniture
The forms of Chinese furniture evolved along three distinct lineages, dating back to 1000 BC: frame and panel, yoke and rack (based on post-and-rail seen in architecture), and bamboo construction techniques.
Chinese furniture is mainly made of plain, polished wood, but from at least the Song dynasty, the most luxurious pieces often used lacquer to cover the whole or parts of the visible areas. All the various sub-techniques of Chinese lacquerware can be found on furniture and became increasingly affordable down the social scale—thus widely used—from about the Ming dynasty onwards. Carved lacquer furniture was, at first, only affordable by the imperial family or the extremely rich.
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