China: Its History, Arts, and Literature/Volume 1/Chapter 1
CHINA
ITS HISTORY ARTS AND
LITERATURE
Chapter I
CHINESE PORCELAIN AND POTTERY
AS TO THE FIRST MANUFACTURE OF TRUE PORCELAIN IN CHINA
In former years France stood alone in her appreciation of Chinese keramic productions. By French amateurs only was properly understood the double triumph of æstheticism and technique achieved in the monochromatic vases of the Ching-tê-chên factories. In England, the popular idea of Chinese porcelain was a highly decorated, formally painted ware. So little valued were monochromatic or even blue-and-white pieces, that if any such found their way to London, they were deemed unsaleable until their surface had received pictorial additions at the hands of Anglo-Saxon potters. Such sacrileges are no longer perpetrated. All Western collectors have now learned to appreciate the incomparable beauty of the Kang-hsi and Chien-lung blues. These fine pieces, as well as their contemporaries of the monochromatic and polychromatic orders, derive additional value from the fact that, so far as human foresight can reach, the potters of the Middle Kingdom will never be able to reproduce them with absolute success. Those who have read the accounts, recorded in Chinese and Japanese literature, of men almost deified as the discoverers of some new boccaro clay; or who have heard the fond tradition how the pâte of every choice piece fired at the potteries of the Po-yang Lake had invariably received a century's manipulation; or how the materials of celebrated glazes were ground and re-ground during the life-time of half a generation until they were reduced to impalpable powder; or how, to distinguish the true colouring pigment—the Mohammedan blue, worth more than its weight in gold—from the many imperfect compounds which nature's laboratory offered, was an accomplishment possessed by the most gifted experts only; those who are familiar with all these things have no difficulty in understanding that the decadence of such extraordinary processes, such labours of almost crazy love, was an inevitable outcome of the world's changed conditions. Regarded, therefore, as works of art which have ceased to be produced, and which must become every day more unprocurable, the Hawthorns and other hard-paste blue-and-white specimens which in recent years created a furore among English collectors, were not unworthy of the homage they received. But from a Chinese point of view, such pieces are not to be placed in the very first rank of keramic masterpieces. The instinct of the French amateurs of former years directed them more truly when it inspired their love of monochromatic wares and of soft-paste pieces decorated with blue sous couverte, and the instinct of American collectors has happily followed in the same direction.
It was natural, in view of this appreciative mood of French amateurs, that the first researches into the subject of Chinese keramics should be made by French authors. M. Stanilas Julien led the way with his translation of the Ching-tê-chên Tao-lu, or "History of Ching-tê-chên Keramics." This work was published in 1856, and has remained since then an authoritative text-book. But M. Julien laboured under a very great disadvantage. He possessed no knowledge of the processes described in the Chinese volume. He was simply a student of languages, competent to render the meaning of an ideograph, but without either the experience of a connoisseur or the education of an artist. Nothing could have been more extravagant than to expect that his interpretation of the Tao-lu would be free from error. The book itself, apart from the special attainments its subject demanded, was not calculated to facilitate a translator's task. Compiled, for the most part, in the early years of the present century, that is to say, when Chinese potters were already beginning to lose their ancient dexterity, its author relied upon tradition for the bulk of his materials; and, to crown all, died before the volume was completed. The compilation and publication of the information he had collected devolved upon his pupil, Ching Ting-kwei, who, judged by the account he gives of himself, had little knowledge of keramic processes. One valuable work the author of the Tao-lu was able to consult, namely, the Tao-shu, or "Keramic Annals," written nearly half a century previously during the reign of the celebrated Chien-lung. But neither the Tao-shu nor the Tao-lu aimed at furnishing such information as a Western student desires. The object of both alike was mainly to preserve a catalogue of the most celebrated wares with their dates and places of manufacture and occasionally some meagre details of their nature. M. Julien, then, however conscientious as a linguist, could not fail to be misled and to mislead. He was followed, in 1875, by M. Jacquemart, an over-speculative connoisseur, who, great as was the debt of gratitude under which he placed collectors, wrote unfortunately in such a way as to mix the keramics of China, Korea, and Japan in confusion. Taking some of the choicest specimens of Chinese work, he allotted them to Korea or Japan; content to assume, in the one case, that Chinese artists never depicted Mandarins on their vases, and that, consequently, all vases thus decorated must be Japanese; and in the other, that any piece the decoration of which seemed to him to possess both Chinese and Japanese characteristics must come from a country between the two empires, namely, from Korea. Thus wherever Julien had led the public astray, Jacquemart helped to render the aberration permanent. One example is conspicuous:—Julien, falsely rendering a single word, said that the most esteemed variety of the Kuan-yao (Imperial ware) manufactured under the Sung dynasty (960-1279) was blue. Jacquemart thereupon wrote, "Le décor le plus ancien et le plus estimé au Céleste-Empire est celui en camaïeu bleu. Il s'exécute sur la pâte simplement séchée après le travail du tournage, et crue; on pose la couverte ensuite, on cuit, et dès lors la peinture devient inattaquable. Dans les temps les plus anciens, le cobalt n'était pas d'une pureté irréprochable; son plus ou moins grand éclat peut donc aider à fixer des dates approximatives. Pour prouver jusqu'à quel point les porcelaines bleues étaient estimées, il suffit de rappeler qu'on les appelait Kuan-ki, vases des magistrats." Now, the fact is that decoration in blue under the glaze retained all the characteristics of a most rudimentary manufacture throughout the Sung dynasty; that the colour erroneously translated "blue" by Julien, referred to the glaze itself, not to the decoration, and that the Kuan-ki never included ware having blue designs sous couverte. The whole import of these misconceptions will be presently appreciated by the reader. Their number, and the very false conclusions to which they led Julien, Jacquemart, and other less notable writers, have contributed to obscure a subject already sufficiently perplexing.
The annals of the Middle Kingdom attribute the infancy of the keramic art either to the reign of Huang-ti, or to that of Shun, semi-mythical sovereigns who are supposed to have flourished some twenty-five centuries before the Christian era. Of these very early wares tradition does not tell anything that can be taken seriously or that need be recorded here. They were doubtless rude, technically defective and inartistic types. At a later date it is stated that Wu Wang, founder of the Chou dynasty (12th century B.C.), appointed a descendant of the Emperor Shun to be director of pottery, and in a record of the same dynasty the processes of fashioning on the wheel and moulding are described. The pieces produced appear to have been funeral urns, libation jars, altar dishes, cooking utensils, and so forth. The same annals add that these manufactures were earthen vessels, and that they were called pi-ki, or vases of pottery. More than nine hundred years later (B.C. 202), there is talk of another species of ware called tao-ki which differed in some respects from its predecessor, and to which Western interpreters of Chinese history apply the term "porcelain." According to this theory, the manufacture of pottery commenced in China B.C. 2698, and that of porcelain between 202 B.C. and 88 A.D. It is to be observed, however, that among Chinese writers themselves some confusion exists on this subject. Julien reflects their bewilderment. Of four ideographs each translated "porcelain" by him, the first, tao, is used sometimes generically for all keramic wares, sometimes in the sense of pottery alone; the second, yao, signifies anything stoved or fired, and has no more specific signification than "ware;" the third, ki, simply means utensil, and is applicable to stone, iron or pottery; and the fourth, tsu, is written in two ways, the latter of which, according to some scholars (whose dictum is open to much doubt), was originally employed to designate porcelain proper, though both subsequently came to be used in that sense. When the fact is recalled that even among Western authors it is a common habit to employ the word "porcelain" in reference to baked and glazed vessels, whether translucid or opaque, there is no difficulty in supposing that Chinese writers were at least equally inaccurate. As for M. Julien's nomenclature, the impossibility of relying implicitly on its evidence is shown by the fact that, speaking of a so-called "porcelain" manufactured by the elder of two brothers (Chang), who flourished under the Sung dynasty (960-1277), he says that it was made of "une argile brune"; that a variety of the Chûn ware (also of the Sung dynasty) which he equally describes as "porcelain," was of "une argile jaune et sablonneuse;" and that in other instances the pâte of his so-called "porcelain" was of an iron-red colour. Plainly the term "porcelain" cannot properly be applied to such wares, and it becomes evident that both in the original of the distinguished sinologue's translation and in the translation itself, the same looseness of phraseology occurs.
Turning now for information to the neighbouring empire of Japan, it appears that in the middle of the fifth century of the Christian era, a Japanese Emperor, Yuriaku, issued a sumptuary decree requiring that a class of ware called seiki should be substituted for the earthen utensils hitherto employed at the Court. Ancient Japanese commentators interpret this seiki as another expression for tao-ki, the so-called "porcelain" of China. Now it is known that, despite the importation of Chinese wares into Japan which had taken place either directly or through Korea from the earliest times, and despite the tolerably regular trade carried on by Chinese merchants with the neighbouring empire, not so much as one piece of ware to which the term "porcelain" could be accurately applied, reached Japan before the twelfth century. The seiki of Yuriaku's time cannot, therefore, have been anything better than glazed pottery, and the same is doubtless true of its synonym, the tao-ki, said to have been invented in China at the beginning of the Christian era. In addition to this negative evidence, there are the positive statements of Japanese antiquarians, who unhesitatingly ascribe the invention of porcelain proper to the keramists of the Sung dynasty (960-1279). It was then, they aver,—whatever value the assertion may have—that the ideograph tsu was first written in such a way as to indicate the presence of kaolin in the ware; and it was then that Japan began to receive from China specimens of coarse porcelain, some of which are still preserved and venerated by collectors.
That the manufacture of translucid porcelain in China should have preceded its manufacture in Europe by only seven centuries, instead of seventeen as has hitherto been maintained, will not be readily admitted. Yet there is much to support the Japanese view. It is known that before and after the time to which the invention of porcelain is commonly attributed, the Chinese were in commercial communication with the eastern countries of the Roman Empire, and that they received from thence various kinds of glass which they ranked with the seven Buddhist gems. For this glass—of which there were two principal classes, lu-li or opaque glass, and po-li or transparent—they paid immense prices. They had no suspicion that it was artificial, regarding it rather as ice a thousand years old, a precious stone second only to jade. By the Japanese, also, it was held in scarcely less esteem. Beads, probably made on the coast near Sidon, were treasured by Japanese Emperors, buried in their tombs, or preserved among their relics. The Chinese supplied the Japanese with glass, and were themselves supplied by the Syrians, but all the while no Chinese porcelain found its way either to Rome or Japan. Its invention was still in the lap of a distant future. Dr. Hirth, in his recently published work, "China and the Roman Orient," says:—"During the Tats'in period (i.e. the period of China's commercial intercourse with the Roman Orient), "that peculiar fancy for objets de vertu which in Chinese life have at all times taken the place of other luxuries, was not yet absorbed by the porcelain industry, which probably did not begin to assume large dimensions previous to the Tang dynasty. Clumsy copper censers and other sacrificial implements, imitating the then archaic style of the Chan dynasty, monopolised the attention of the rich, together with the so-called precious materials. A large portion of the latter came from Tats'in, and glass is in all the older records mentioned among them." Had Dr. Hirth written "keramic," instead of "porcelain," industry, there would have been nothing to question in this opinion. The Chinese do not seem to have turned their attention seriously to keramics until, as in Japan four centuries later, the growing popularity of tea, under the Tang dynasty (618-907), provided a new function for vessels of faïence. Glass was then comparatively out of fashion. Its composition had become known to the Chinese about 430 A.D., and they already excelled in its manufacture. Thenceforth glazed pottery or fine stone-ware became the national taste, until, in the tenth or eleventh century, porcelain was discovered.
Du Sartel, in his "Porcelaine de Chine," says that under the Tang dynasty (618-907), the term yao was substituted for tao in describing the keramic productions of the era, and concludes that the substitution may be taken as indicating the first manufacture of true porcelain. Neither the fact upon which this inference is founded nor the inference itself can be accepted. As far back as the Wei dynasty (220-265), the ideograph yao was used with reference to pottery; and in comparatively modern times, when the distinctive meaning of the two ideographs—did any distinction really exist in the sense indicated by M. du Sartel—would have been fully recognised, the term yao was applied to boccaro ware, which cannot for a moment be confounded with porcelain. It is unsafe to attach much chronological importance to differences of terms and ideographs about which confusion still exists.
There are two pieces of evidence which, whatever may be their real value, seem opposed to the verdict of Japanese antiquarians as to the earliest manufacture of porcelain in China. The first is furnished by the Cha Ching, a treatise on tea, written by Liu Yu, in the middle of the eighth century of the Christian era. In this book descriptions are given of various kinds of tea-cups, the merits of which are judged rather by the effect of their coloured glazes in contrast with the colour of infused tea, than by their keramic qualities. Of the best, which are said to have been made at a place called Yueh-chou (now Shao-hsing-fu) in the province of Chikiang, it is related that they were as transparent as jade, and that, owing to the sweetness of their timbre, they were used like musical glasses. The second piece of evidence is the story told by an Arab traveller, Solyman, who visited China in the middle of the ninth century. He wrote:—"There is in this country a very fine clay with which they make vases that have the transparence of glass. Water can be seen through them." This account has been held to indicate the existence of translucid ware; that is to say, the existence not only of porcelain proper, but even of the finest and thinnest description of porcelain. There seems little hope now of determining exactly what was meant by the author Liu Yu or the traveller Solyman. But their language does not necessarily refer to porcelain proper. Translucidity alone is not an absolute proof of real porcelain. Witness, for example, the so-called "porcelain" of Persia, a ware which, by being exposed to an unusual degree of temperature in the kiln, often acquired a certain transparency though his pâte remained soft enough to be marked with a knife.
Recently Dr. Hirth discovered two interesting pieces of evidence. The first is a statement by a writer (Tao Yin-chü) who flourished in the early part of the sixth century, to the effect that a substance called pai-ngo was then much used for painting pictures. The second is an assertion in the pharmacopaia of the Tang dynasty (compiled about 650 A.D.) that this same substance had been employed to make keramic ware during recent generations. Now pai-ngo is nothing more or less than kaolin, and Dr. Hirth concludes that the silence of the former writer—a celebrated authority on pharmaceutical and scientific subjects—as to the use of this mineral for keramic purposes, may be taken to prove that it had not yet begun to be thus employed; or, in other words, that the manufacture of true porcelain proper had not yet been commenced. Assuming the correctness of this inference, and combining it with the statement in the Tang pharmacopoeia, it would follow that the first production of porcelain in China dates from the close of the sixth century of the Christian era. In further confirmation of this opinion, the same writer quotes the following passage from an essay on flower-pots by Chang Chien-tê, published about the year 1620:—"In ancient times no vases were made of porcelain. Up to the Tang dynasty (i.e. the beginning of the 7th century) all such vessels (for flowers) were made of copper: it was not till then that pottery came into vogue." But Chang's statement proves nothing as to true porcelain and Dr. Hirth's inferences are not conclusive.
From all this it will be seen that little hope remains of arriving at an accurate decision as to the first manufacture of translucid porcelain in China. It seems fair to conclude, however, that although the keramic art was tolerably widely practised from the beginning of the Tang dynasty (618), it scarcely emerged from a mediocre condition until the tenth century; that for any purpose higher than the rôle of ordinary household utensils, vessels of glass, jade, or bronze were chiefly employed, and that porcelain did not make its appearance among the keramic productions of the Middle Kingdom until the beginning of the Sung dynasty (960 A.D.). By and by, evidence will be adduced to show that Chinese experts, though thorough masters of the processes of porcelain manufacture, deliberately chose fine stone-ware or semi-porcelain, in preference to hard-paste porcelain, for some of their greatest tours de force.