Artisan Story: BOTANSA VRETHA
In the winter of 1927 Shanghai, Franco-Chinese socialite Isabella Vretha discovered a broken jade pine brooch inside her grandmother’s rosewood vanity box.
Faded upon a French letter lay a cryptic line: “To Botansa — follow the jade’s guidance beneath the ancient pine.”
This century-old riddle was finally unveiled beneath a three-hundred-year-old pine forest in Suzhou, where a bronze casket revealed the missing jade fragment and a long-lost Ming dynasty manuscript, The Craftsman’s Notes.
“Botansa,” once forgotten by history, was none other than Empress Dowager Cixi’s imperial jeweler — a master who fused literati aesthetics with Baroque splendor, bridging East and West in his art.
In 2019, his descendants revived this fractured beauty under the name BOTANSA VRETHA, allowing the broken elegance of Oriental craftsmanship to bloom anew in the modern age.