Porcelain

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.

The brown glazes form a very distinct class. The well-known colour has many names: in French fond laque; in Chinese tzu-kin, or ‘burnished gold.’ It is also known as ‘dead leaf,’ but the average tint is perhaps best described as café au lait. The Père D’Entrecolles, in mentioning the tzu-kin, the colour of which he says is given by a ‘common yellow earth,’ states that it was a recent invention in his time. He is perhaps referring to some special tint, for the colour was well known in Ming days. We have already spoken of the possible relation of this colour to the copper lustre of the fourteenth century Persian fayence. At a later time in the seventeenth century it was a favourite colour with the Persians, especially when decorated with delicate designs of flowers and ferns in a thin white slip (Pl. xvi.). It was largely exported at that time from China and cleverly imitated in the fayence and frit-pastes of Persia. Both the original Chinese ware and the Persian imitation are well represented at South Kensington by specimens brought from the latter country. This brown glaze is seldom found alone. It is a colour that stands well the full heat of the furnace, and it may be combined with a blue and white decoration or with bands of celadon. It forms the ground-colour of the so-called Batavian ware, and at one time a brown ring was by our ancestors held to be essential on the rim of a fine plate or bowl of blue and white porcelain.

PLATE XVI. CHINESE, WHITE SLIP ON BROWN GROUND

Turquoise and Purple Glazes.—As for the twin colours of the demi grand feu (the yellow in this group is quite subordinate), the so-called turquoise (including the peacock green and kingfisher blue of the Chinese) and the aubergine purple, the latter is seldom found alone. Both colours are distinguished by a very fine-grained crackle. Of the blue, when used as a single-glaze colour, we have spoken when describing the glazes of the demi grand feu.

Yellow Monochrome Glazes.—There are many shades of yellow found on Chinese porcelain: the imperial yellow of full yolk-of-egg tint, the lemon yellow, the greenish ‘eel-skin,’ and the ‘boiled chestnut.’ Only the first, the imperial yellow, is of importance as a monochrome glaze. This is the colour first used in the time of the Ming emperor Hung-chi (1487-1505), and his name is sometimes found on bowls and plates ranging in colour from a bright mustard to a boiled chestnut tint. There are some good specimens in the British Museum, and a curious piece, with a Persian inscription, at South Kensington, has already been mentioned when speaking of the reign of Hung-chi.

Cobalt Blue Monochrome Glazes.—We may distinguish three varieties of blue derived from cobalt, but the full sapphire of the blue and white ware is not found as a monochrome glaze:—

1. The Clair de lune. The term yueh-pai, or moon-white, was applied to more than one class of Sung porcelain, but above all to the Ju yao. In later times, when these primitive wares were copied, the colour was given by a minute quantity of cobalt, but it is very doubtful whether that pigment was known in early Sung days. The clair de lune glazes of Nien were considered second in merit only to the copper reds of that great viceroy. The uncrackled glazes of this class are often classed as celadon.

2. The Mazarin blue, known also as bleu fouetté or powder-blue.⁸⁹ This glaze is blown on to the surface of the raw paste, in the manner described on page 30. It sometimes covers the whole surface, and is then generally decorated with floral designs in gold, but more often it forms the ground for vases and plates with large white reserves on which designs in enamel colours are painted.

3. The Gros Bleu, in the form of large plates and vases, was a great favourite with the Arabs and other Mohammedan races. This ware, too, was often covered with a decoration of gold. There is a magnificent plate of this class in the British Museum, and at South Kensington, in the India Museum, a tall, dark-blue vase which we have already mentioned. From Persia come many specimens of this deep blue ware, of a greyish or even slaty tint, decorated, like the fond laque, with flowers in a white slip.

Black Glazes.—Very near to this last class of blue glazes we may place the ‘metallic black,’ the wu-chin of the Chinese. According to the Père D’Entrecolles, this mirror-black is prepared by mixing with a glaze containing much lime and some of the same ochry earth that gives the colour to the brown glazes, a sufficient quantity of cobalt of poor quality. In this case no second glaze is required, and the vessel is fired in the demi grand feu, i.e. in the front of the furnace. Other blacks are painted on and covered with a second glaze. The large spherical vases with tall tubular necks show little trace generally of the gold with which the black glaze was originally decorated.

Green Glazes.—The peculiar tint of green, in varied intensity, that distinguishes the famille verte is seldom found as a single glaze; and of the green Lang yao, made by Lang Ting-tso in the early part of the reign of Kang-he, it is doubtful whether we have any representatives in our European collections. This glaze is said to be somewhat in the style of his more famous sang de bœuf.

The brilliant cucumber or apple-green of Ming times is shown in a pair of exquisite little bowls in the British Museum. Over the green glaze there is a scroll pattern of gold, and on the inside a blue decoration under the glaze. Almost identical with these is the bowl set in a silver-gilt mounting of English make dating from about the year 1540, now preserved in the Gold Room (Pl. v.). Of a similar but somewhat deeper tint of green are the rare crackle vases, generally of small size, of which there are specimens in the British Museum and in the Salting collection.⁹⁰

Olive and Bronze Glazes.—The monochrome glazes of various shades of olive and bronze are for the most part produced by a soufflé process, in which on a base of one colour a second colour is sprinkled. Thus to form the ‘tea-dust’ a green glaze is blown over a reddish ground derived from iron. The wonderful bronze glazes, of which there are good specimens in the British Museum and in the Salting collection, are produced in a similar way. But some of these (and the same may be said of the ‘iron rusts‘) partake rather of the nature of the more elaborated glazes of the flambé class.

Red and Flambé Glazes (Pl. xvii.).—We have left the red glazes to the last, both from the complicated nature of the class and because one variety, the sang de bœuf, forms a transition to the ‘splashed’ or flambé division. A red glaze or enamel, we have seen, can be produced from three metals,—from gold, from copper, and from iron. With the Rose d’or, which may be classed as a monochrome enamel, when used to cover the backs of plates and bowls, we are not concerned here—it is not properly a glaze in our sense of the word. The red derived from the sesqui-oxide of iron was only successfully applied as a monochrome when, at a late period, the difficulties attending its use were overcome by combining the pigment with an alkaline flux. This is the Mo-hung or ‘painted red’ of the muffle-stove, which was painted over the already glazed ware, and therefore not properly itself a glaze. In fine specimens it approaches to a vermilion colour; it is the jujube red of the Chinese. It is with this colour, laid upon the elaborately modelled paste, that the carved cinnabar lacquer is so wonderfully imitated.⁹¹

But it is the red derived from copper that presents the most points of interest. Indeed we now enter upon a series of glazes, beginning with the pure deep red of the sang de bœuf, and then passing over the line to the long series of variegated or ‘transmutation‘⁹² glazes that have more than any others fascinated the modern amateurs of ceramic problems. We have already seen how these magic effects are produced by carefully modulating the passage of the oxidising currents through an otherwise smoky and reducing atmosphere in the furnace ((p. page 42).

PLATE XVII. CHINESE

The typical sang de bœuf, or the ‘red of the sacrifice,’ as the Chinese call it, was that made under the régime of Lang Ting-tso a forerunner of the three great directors of the imperial manufactory at King-te-chen, and in later times it was always the aim of the potter to imitate his work—the Lang yao—even in trifling details. According to the Père D’Entrecolles, to obtain this red the Chinese made use of a finely granulated copper which they obtained from the silver refiners, and which therefore probably contained silver. Some other very remarkable substances, he tells us, entered into the composition, but of these it is the less necessary to speak, as he confesses that great secrecy was maintained on the subject.

In looking carefully into a glaze of this kind, the deep colouring-matter is seen suspended in a more or less greenish or yellowish transparent matrix, in the form of streaks and clots of a nearly opaque material.⁹³ The hue, in general effect, varies from a deep blood-red to various shades of orange and brown, but intimately mixed with the red, certain bluish streaks are sometimes to be seen in one part or another of the surface. The colours should stop evenly at the rim and at the base, which parts, if this is achieved, are covered with a transparent glaze of pale greenish or yellowish tint.

We have already seen that much depends upon the period of the firing at which the glaze becomes liquid or soft, and upon the exact degree of fluidity attained by it. Should the oxidising currents be allowed further play at the critical period of the firing, the blue and greenish stains and splashes will become more predominant, and we may either pass over to the flambé or ‘transmutation’ glazes, or finally the glaze may become almost white and transparent.

But we must hark back to the wares of the Sung period, to the Chün yao, to find the origin of these variegated glazes. These early Sung glazes were copied in the time of Yung-cheng, and if we are to believe the contemporary list, already quoted, of the objects copied, they were of a very complicated nature. In this class of flambé ware we must include also a large part of the so-called Yuan tsu (see page 77), a heavy kaolinic stoneware, certainly not all dating from the Yuan or Mongol period—a ware, indeed, still common in the north of China. This ware is roughly covered with a glaze of predominant lavender tint, speckled with red, and thus approaches to the ‘robin’s egg’ glaze of the American collector, though this latter is found on a finer porcelain of later times.

Another name which has been used to include many of these variegated glazes is Yao-pien or ‘furnace-transmutation.’ This last word very well expresses the process by which the colour is developed, but it must be remembered that this is not exactly the meaning that the word yao-pien conveys to the Chinese mind.⁹⁴ With this term the happy accidents of the furnace were linked by the Père D’Entrecolles: he tells us that it was proposed to make a sacrificial red, but that the vase came from the furnace like a kind of agate. Dr. Bushell thinks that most of the fine pieces of this ware date from the time of Yung-cheng and Kien-lung (1722-1795), and he is of opinion that they were prepared by a soufflé process rather than by any ‘academic transformation’ of a copper-red glaze. ‘The piece,’ he says, ‘coated with a greyish crackle glaze or with a ferruginous enamel of yellowish-brown tone, has the transmutation glaze applied at the same time as a kind of overcoat. It is put on with the brush in various ways, in thick dashes not completely covering the surface of the piece, or flecked as with the point of the brush in a rain of drops. The piece is finally fired in a reducing atmosphere, and the air, let in at the critical moment when the materials are fully fused, imparts atoms of oxygen to the copper and speckles the red base with points of green and turquoise blue’ (Oriental Ceramic Art, pp. 516-17). Some practical experiments lately made in France would tend to show that the critical moment should be placed a little earlier, before the glaze is completely fused, for after that point is reached the surrounding atmosphere has little influence upon the metallic oxides in the glaze. It is to this capricious action of the furnace gases that are due those wonderful effects that may be observed in looking into these glazes, curdled masses of strange shapes and varying colour suspended in a more or less transparent medium, and assuming at times those textures resembling animal tissues which are graphically described by the Chinese as pig’s liver or mule’s lungs. It must be understood that into many of the more modern and apprêtés specimens of flambé ware the sources of the violent contrasts of colour are found not only in the oxides of copper and iron, but in those of cobalt and manganese also.