Porcelain

To return to the father’s letters:—In China this hua-shi is five times as dear as kaolin. Four parts of it are mixed with one part of petuntse to make the paste. The porcelain made with this material is rare, and much more expensive than any other. Compared to ordinary porcelain, it is as vellum compared with paper; it is, besides, of a lightness that is quite surprising. It is, however, very fragile, and there are great difficulties connected with the firing. For this reason it is sometimes only applied as a coating to the surface of ordinary paste. The hua-shi is also used to form an ivory-white slip, with which designs are delicately painted on the surface of the vessel. (We may probably identify this hua-shi ware with the sha t’ai or ‘soft paste,’ so called, of Western collectors.)

What we are told by the Jesuit father about the revival of the manufacture of celadon is of great interest. ‘I was shown this year,’ he says, ‘for the first time, a new kind of porcelain which is now in fashion. It is of a colour approaching olive, and is called Lung-chuan.’ The colour of the glaze is given by the same yellow earth that is used for the or bruni glaze, and it is often highly crackled. With this statement we may compare the account which he gives in another part of his second letter of the revival of the manufacture of archaic wares. ‘The Mandarin of King-te-chen, who honoured me with his friendship, made presents to his protectors at the court of pieces of old porcelain [sic] which he has the talent to make himself. I mean that he has found the art of imitating the ancient ware, or at least that of a considerable age, and he employs a number of workmen with this object. The material of these false antiques (Chinese Ku-tung) is a yellowish earth brought from the Ma-an mountains. They are very thick—a plate which the Mandarin gave me was ten times the usual weight. The peculiarity of this ware is the glaze made from a yellowish rock, which becomes sea-green on firing.’ This change of colour, of course, was the result of a reducing flame, but note the keen observation of the narrator. ‘When completed the pieces are boiled in a very greasy soup, and then left for a month or more in the most foul drain that can be found. After this process they may claim to be three or four hundred years old, and to date from the dynasty preceding the Ming. They resemble the real antiques in not giving a ringing note when struck.... They have brought me from the débris of a large shop a little plate which I value more than the finest porcelain made a thousand years ago. On it is painted a crucifix between the Holy Virgin and St. John. Such pieces were made formerly for Japan, but they have not been in demand for the last sixteen or seventeen years.’ These plates, he thinks, were smuggled into that country mixed with other goods, for the use of the native Christians. (Cf. the Japanese dish, Pl. xiv.)

PLATE XIV. JAPANESE, IMARI WARE, BLUE AND WHITE WITH GOLD

The account given by the Père D’Entrecolles of the firing of porcelain is so detailed and accurate that it forms an interesting commentary on what we have said in a former chapter on this subject.81 We have first a description of the man who carries the unbaked ware to the furnace, ranged on two long narrow planks. Balancing these on his shoulders, he threads his way through the narrow streets, for the furnaces, as we have seen, may often be a long way from the factory. He goes on to say, ‘the place where the furnaces are presents another scene. In a kind of vestibule in front of the kilns are seen heaps of clay boxes destined to contain the porcelain.’ These, of course, are the ‘seggars’ already described. Each piece of porcelain of any size has its own case. The smaller pieces are packed many together in one seggar. On the bottom of each of these cases is a layer of sand covered with a little powdered kaolin. Each seggar forms the cover to the one below it, and so the whole furnace is filled with these great piles of cases each packed with porcelain. ‘By favour of this thick veil the beauty, and if I may so express myself, the complexion of the porcelain is not tanned by the ardour of the fire.’ The workman, without touching the fragile raw pieces, rapidly transfers them to the furnace by means of a flexible wooden fork. There are six inches of coarse gravel in the bottom of the furnace, and on this rest the piles of seggars. The middle range is at least seven feet high, the two lowest seggars in each pile being left empty, as is also the one on the top. The middle of the furnace is reserved for the finest porcelain, while near the front are the pieces made with a more fusible paste. The piles of seggars are strengthened by being battened together with clay, but it is the first duty of the fireman to see that there is a free passage of air. The seggars are made in a large village a league from King-te-chen, with a mixture of three kinds of clay.

The furnaces, he tells us, which are now of larger dimensions than formerly, are built over a capacious arched vault, and the hearth or fireplace extends across the whole width of the front of the furnace. It would seem that the process of firing is carried on more rapidly than in former days, and to economise fuel and time the smaller pieces at any rate are taken out a few hours after the extinction of the fire. Sometimes on opening the furnace the whole contents, both seggars and porcelain, are found to be reduced to a half-melted mass as hard as a rock. A change in the weather may alter in a moment the action of the fire, so that a hundred workmen are ruined to one who succeeds and is able to set up a crockery shop.

The ware made in European style finds no favour with the Chinese, and if not accepted by the export merchants remains on the maker’s hands.

We are told of the marvellous tours de force executed in porcelain, some years ago, for the heir-apparent, especially of certain open-work lanterns82 and strange musical instruments. We see from this at how early a date the future emperor (Yung-cheng) showed an interest in porcelain. The Chinese, it is said, succeed above all in grotesques and in figures of animals; the workmen make ducks and tortoises that float on the water. They make, too, many statues of Kwan-yin,—she is represented holding a child in her arms, and in this form is invoked by sterile women who wish for children.

The mandarins, he continues, who appreciate the talents of Europeans for ingenious novelties, have sometimes asked me to procure for them from Europe new and curious designs, so that they may have something singular to present to the emperor.83 On the other hand, the Christian workmen strongly urged me to do no such thing. For the mandarins do not yield so easily as our merchants when told that a proposed work is impracticable. Many are the bastinados given to the men before the official will abandon the design from which he hoped so much profit.

‘What becomes of the vast accumulation of potsherds, both from the seggars and from the firings?’ the writer finally asks. Mixed with lime, they are largely used to form a cement with which the walls of gardens and roads are constructed. They also help to build up the new ground which is reclaimed from the banks of the river. Carried down thence by the floods, they form a glittering pavement for many miles below the town.

In the detailed account of King-te-chen given by the Jesuit father, we find no mention of the imperial manufactory. Are we to understand that he found no admittance to these workshops? His acquaintance with the higher mandarins makes this unlikely. Nor can we think that these works were closed during the long period of his stay in this district. Another omission that has been pointed out is, I think, more easy of explanation. The Père D’Entrecolles, while giving in great detail the method of preparation of the various colours used in the enamels and glazes, does not say a word about the famous crimson derived from gold, so largely used in the famille rose decoration. I cannot but think that this omission is an almost conclusive proof that the rouge d’or was not known at that time.84 The ignorance of the Chinese of chemical processes is dwelt upon, and it is especially mentioned that they are acquainted with neither aqua fortis nor aqua regia.

CHAPTER   X

THE PORCELAIN OF CHINA—(continued)

GORMS and Uses—Description of the various Wares

WE have now given a summary sketch of the history and development of the porcelain of China, and have seen something of the processes of manufacture and decoration. Incidentally some account has been given of the principal wares.

We now propose to take up the subject from the side of the paste, the glaze, and the decoration, putting aside the question of age and of historical sequence, and to run through the various classes into which we can divide our material under these heads. We shall follow as far as possible the arrangement adopted in the British Museum, passing from the simpler forms of decoration to the more complex.

First, however, let us say a few words on the forms given to porcelain by the Chinese, and the uses these objects are put to in the country of their origin.85

In a first glance at any large collection of Chinese porcelain the bulk of the objects shown appear to fall into four classes: plates and dishes, bowls, vases for flowers, and covered jars.86 But a closer examination discloses an endless variety of other uses to which porcelain has been applied by the Chinese.

The figures of the gods and the vessels associated with their worship found in the temples and household shrines form by themselves a large division. Here the use of porcelain has from a very early period been encouraged at the expense of bronze and other metals. The ritual vessels used in the imperial worship at Pekin have for ages been made of porcelain. Many of them, as the jars for sacrificial wine, in the form of elephants and rhinoceroses, are copied from the most archaic bronze types; of the same origin is the small libation cup of peculiar shape sometimes seen in our collections. The Wu-kung, or five vessels that stand in front of a Buddhist shrine, the incense-burner in the centre, with a candlestick and a vase on either side, are often in China made of porcelain. In Japan these objects are always of metal. A similar set is found in the Taoist temples. The colour of the vessels in ritual use at Pekin varies with the temple in which they are found. Those of the ancestral temple of the emperors are of imperial yellow; those of the altar of heaven of a deep blue (a set of five of this colour, recently brought from Pekin, may be seen at South Kensington). A red glazed ware is connected with the altar of the sun, and white with that of the planet Jupiter.

The objects used in the burning of perfume, the basis doubtless of the highly elaborated apparatus of the Japanese, are usually made of porcelain: these are the incense-burner, the boxes for the perfumes, and the little vase to hold the fire-sticks and the tongs. From these we may pass to the various objects found on the table of the cultured classes, most of them connected with literary pursuits. This is an important division in Chinese collections, as we may judge from the often-quoted manuscript catalogue of Dr. Bushell. The slabs, the water-drippers, and a dozen other small objects are modelled in a variety of forms. The pen-rest is generally in the shape of a small range of mountains, the highest in the centre (this, by the way, is the ancient form of the Chinese character for ‘mountain,’ cf. Pl. viii.). One of the strangest uses to which porcelain is put by the Chinese is the hat-stand in the form of a hollow sphere supported on a tall, tubular column—the sphere may be filled with either fine charcoal embers or with ice, according to the season.

Pillows, too, are made of porcelain—there is one of the famille verte in the Salting collection—but the native collector is warned against those of a certain size and shape, as they may have been stolen from tombs. Tall vases to contain arrows, either cylindrical or square in section, are especially connected with the Manchus. These large vessels may generally be known by their porcelain stands often surrounded by railings.

The vases and bowls are of all sizes and shapes. The biggest ovoid vases with dome-shaped covers may stand in the hall on carved stands; indeed, they are found in similar positions in many of the palaces of India, Persia, and Europe.

The flower vases form an important group, and as in Japan, there is quite a library of illustrated work devoted to them. Both the shape and the decoration of the vase are dependent upon the flowers it is destined to hold, and the arrangement and combination of these flowers is regulated by rival schools of specialists.

The combination of five pieces to form a garniture de cheminée is not altogether a European idea. The Chinese have a similar combination—the Wu-shê, or set of five; but with them an uncovered vase is preferred for the central piece. For the service of the dinner-table there are many forms: among the cups, plates, and dishes of all shapes and sizes we may select for mention the dishes with covers indicating by their shapes the contents—fish, birds, or fruit. With these we may compare the similar forms made at one time at Chelsea and elsewhere. There are, again, the compound dishes in the form of flowers, each petal forming a compartment. Finally, we must not forget the tall, cylindrical mugs with crown-like tops, used for cooling drinks in summer, or among the Mongols for their koumis.

There are also certain forms made chiefly, but not exclusively, for the Mohammedan west. Of these, we may mention the bases for the hookah, recognisable by the small, straight spouts at the side to which the flexible smoking-tube is attached; the scent-sprinklers with tall, narrow necks; and the hand-spittoons with globular body and wide-spreading orifice,—these last, by the way, are used in China also.

It is not known to what date we can refer the oldest of the little medicine-flasks (Chinese yao-ping) which have in later times been used as snuff-bottles. They seem to have been carried westward in large numbers by the Arab traders, and that from an early date. In shape and size they have varied little.87 Those found so abundantly in Egypt are generally very small, and are often shaped in imitation of a flattened vase with a square foot: some of them are of a rough-looking celadon, others are covered with a green enamel with white reserves. These are the little bottles that found themselves suddenly so famous towards the beginning of the last century, when they were extracted by the Arabs from Egyptian tombs of early dynasties. Somewhat later they encountered some rivals in the small seals of white Chinese porcelain which were discovered in the Irish bogs!

We can only mention in passing a few of the innumerable subsidiary uses which porcelain is made to serve in China, taking the place of so many other materials, above all of metal:—fittings for furniture, especially for the bedstead, frames for the abacus, or calculating-table, knobs for walking-sticks and hanging scrolls, boxes of various shapes and sizes for cosmetics, buttons, bracelets, and hair-ornaments. Finally, the very fragments, what we should call pot-sherds, of the oldest wares, especially when fine in colour, may be found mounted in gold or silver and worn as personal ornaments.

We started our sketch of Chinese porcelain with a rough historical division into three classes. We are now concerned only with questions of glazes and decoration, and we shall find that the apparently innumerable varieties of Chinese porcelain fall, with few exceptions, under one or other of the following heads:—

1. White, or nearly white, ware, which may be glazed or unglazed.

2. Single-glaze wares, either true monochromes or, if of more than one colour, the variety of colour arising from changes brought about in the single glaze during the firing.

3. Porcelain decorated under the glaze. Chiefly blue, less often blue combined with red, or red alone.

4. The decoration given by painting with glazes of more than one colour, probably always on the biscuit. We may call this the class of polychrome glazes.

5. The decoration painted over the glaze with enamels more fusible than the glaze on which they rest.

Plain White Ware.—The white ware made at Ting-chou, a town in the province of Chihli, to the south-west of Pekin, as early as Sung times, served as a type for all the many kinds of similar ware made in later days at King-te-chen. We have seen ((p. page 68) that there was a variety, of the earlier ware, of creamy tint covered with a soft glaze containing lead; this is the Tu-ting, of which there are several specimens in the British Museum. It was, however, the pure white variety, the Feng-ting, that was afterwards copied. The colour of this ware, when not a pure white, tends to blue and greenish tints, and it is often finely crackled. This ware, especially the thin, translucent, egg-shell variety of the time of Yung-lo (1402-25), is much sought after by Chinese collectors.

But the greater part of the plain white Chinese porcelain in European collections was not made either at Ting-chou or at King-te-chen. It is rather to be traced to the only other important centre for the manufacture of porcelain that survives in China. This is the district of Te-hua (Tek-kwa in the local dialect), in the province of Fukien. This province had been famed in Sung times for its tea-bowls covered with a dark glaze, and we must remember that somewhere along its rocky, indented coast was situated the port of Zaitun, so famous in early days for its Arab trade. In later times the roadstead of Amoy came to rival Canton as a port of call for our ships; it is mentioned in this connection by the Père D’Entrecolles, and from it most of the blanc de Chine which at that time reached Europe was probably exported. For it was this Fukien ware rather than the white Ting porcelain that was imported into Europe from the latter half of the seventeenth century, to be copied in the earlier days of Saint-Cloud and Bow. In Spain it was a great favourite from perhaps an earlier date, and when the Buen Retiro works were started this ware was taken as a model.

This white ware does not seem to have been made at Te-hua before the Ming period, but it soon established itself as the pai-tsu—the white ware par excellence of China. It is distinguished by the creamy white of its paste and glaze—that is to say, the colour tends towards a warm, yellowish tint rather than towards the cold, pure white or bluish tone of most of the King-te-chen and still more of the Japanese wares. The satiny glaze appears to melt into the subjacent ground in a way that reminds us of some of the European soft paste porcelains.

PLATE XV. 1—CHINESE, PLAIN WHITE WARE

2—CHINESE, BLUE AND WHITE WARE

It is the moulded ware that is most characteristic of the ‘Kien yao‘—vases with dragons in full relief creeping round the neck, incense-burners in many complicated forms, figures of Kwan-yin (whom we should not call the ‘Goddess of Mercy‘) in many incarnations; or again, Ta-mo (so well known in Japan as Daruma), the Bodhi-dharma who brought the faith to China, with overhanging brows and abstracted, solemn gaze. Among animals, the favourite is the lion, the so-called ‘dog of Fo,’ sporting with an open-work ball.

Many of these figures are very ably executed; they stand firm and erect; and the draperies, though here the mannerisms of the ‘calligraphic’ school of painting may be recognised, fall in simple folds from the shoulders. The prevalence of Buddhist types (for the Taoist divinities are here less frequently represented) may be connected with the exceptional predominance of that religion in Fukien, a province somewhat remote from the rest of China, whose inhabitants speak a dialect very different from the standard Chinese.

Some very creditable work seems to be still turned out from the Te-kua district, to judge by the ware that finds its way to the shops of Fuchow. Some enamelled ware appears to have been at one time made in this district. In the British Museum are some small pieces decorated with five colours (among them a blue enamel over the glaze), which on the ground of the nature of the glaze and the paste have been classed as Fukien ware; while from the style of the decoration they would appear to date from the early eighteenth century.

Much white porcelain, both the Feng-ting and the Fukien, was imported into Europe from the end of the seventeenth century, and it forms an important element in old collections. Some of this white ware, at a later time, was decorated with colours in England and elsewhere, giving rise to a class of porcelain that has caused some confusion to collectors.

In China, white porcelain is used in time of mourning, at least that is the case with that supplied to the imperial court.

Unglazed porcelain is comparatively rare in China, but figures of gods or of animals are sometimes found in biscuit, and the little boxes in which crickets are kept for fighting are generally of unglazed ware. Again, where, as in the class of polychrome glazes, the glaze is applied with a brush, some part may be left unglazed; and this practice has survived in the case of the lions and kilins of the famille verte, where we often find the biscuit exposed in parts of the face.

Celadon Ware.—As the white ware of King-te-chen—the Ting—has got its name from the town of Ting-chou where it was first made, so the many varieties of celadon88 porcelain are connected in the Chinese mind with the town of Lung-chuan, near the southern boundary of the province of Chekiang. We have already given some space to this ware, so important from the cultur-historisch point of view, and we shall have to return to it again when we come to investigate the routes by which the porcelain of China passed in the Middle Ages to other countries. Here we will merely call attention to the later revival of the celadon glazes mentioned in a passage we have quoted from the letters of the Jesuit father. But the highly finished porcelain, with a fine white paste covered with a pale greyish-green glaze of uniform thickness and shade, differs much from the old vases with ‘red mouth and foot.’ There is a remarkably fine specimen in the Wallace collection at Hertford House with chased metal mountings of the time of Louis xv., and other pieces similarly mounted in the Jones collection.

Crackle Ware.—It would only create confusion to make a special class for the many kinds of ware covered with a crackled glaze. It will be remembered that we first came across glazes of this kind when describing the Ko yao, the ‘ware of the Elder Brother,’ and a large class of porcelain with white to yellowish grey glaze, always more or less crackled, is still commonly known as Ko yao in China, so that ‘Crackle ware’ and ‘Ko yao’ are in a measure equivalent terms. Such crackling may vary from a division of the surface into large fissures several inches in length, to the finest reticulation of minute lines hardly visible without a glass. The first the Chinese compare to the cracks of ice, and I think that it is to a variety of crackle with long spindle-shaped divisions that they give the name of ‘crabs claw.’ The finer crackle they know as ‘fish-roe‘—this is the truité of the French. Certain glazes, as the turquoise and the purple of the demi grand feu, are always finely crackled. In other cases the crackling, which is caused, as we have already said ((p. page 32), by the glaze after solidification contracting more than the subjacent paste, may be produced or modified at the will of the potter by adding various substances to the glaze. A rock that has been identified with steatite has been often mentioned in this connection, and the increase in the shrinkage of the glaze attributed to the magnesia contained in it. Probably, however, a change in the proportion of the silica to the alumina may be enough to bring about a crackled glaze. The following extract from the letters of the Père D’Entrecolles throws some light on this point. He tells us that when the glaze is made of cailloux blancs (probably little else than felspar), without other mixture, we obtain the porcelain called Sui-ki, or ‘shattered ware’ (this is the general Chinese term for crackle), ‘marbled all over with an infinity of veins so as to look like a piece of broken porcelain with the pieces remaining in their places.’ The glaze, we are told, is of a cindery white. We have here a description of the Ko yao, which, however, seems to have been little known in Europe at that time. To this class belong the vases with yellowish grey ground and crackles of medium size. They are often provided with mask handles and detached rings. These handles and rings, as well as some broad bands round the neck, are covered, in imitation of bronze, with a dark, roughened glaze. Another variety of this Ko yao is decorated with scattered patches of white slip, laid on apparently over the crackled glazed surface. On this slip is painted the design in cobalt blue under what is apparently a second glaze. A frequent motif on this ware is found in a series of horses in the strangest of positions. These probably represent the eight famous steeds of the old emperor Mu-wang. Both these classes of Ko yao are in great favour in China and Japan as flower vases. The shapes and decorations are more or less reminiscent of the old bronzes. It would seem that ware of this kind is still manufactured at King-te-chen and perhaps somewhere in the north of China also.