Page 191 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

Fukien Porcelain m

resembling our images of the Virgin and Child, Indeed, we

are told ^ that the Japanese converts to Christianity in the six-

teenth century adopted the Kuan-yin figure as a Madonna, and

that there is in the Imperial Museum in the Ueno Park, Tokio, a

remarkable collection of these images among the Christian relics.

There is, however, another deity with whom this Kuan-yin may
.

easily be confounded, viz. the Japanese Kiehimojin, also " the

Maternal," the Sanskrit Hariti, who was once the devourer of

infants but was converted by Sakyamuni and was afterwards wor-

shipped as the protector of children. This deity figures in Japanese
pictorial art as a " female holding a peach and nursing in her bosom

an infant, whose hands are folded in prayer. In front stand two

nude children, one of whom grasps a peach, the other a branch

of bamboo." -

Among the Te-hua porcelains in the British Museum are no fewer

—than nine specimens groups, figures, or ornamental structures

with figures in European costumes which date from the middle to

the end of the seventeenth century. One, a soldier apparently
Dutch, about 1650, is well modelled in deliciously mellow and

translucent cream white porcelain. Most of the others are more

roughly designed, and vary in tint from cream to milk white.
It is said that the natives of the Fukien province are among

the most superstitious of the Chinese, and Bushell ^ sees a reflection

of this religious temperament in the nature of the Te-hua wares.

If this is so, they must have had exalted opinions of their European

visitors, whom they often furnish with the attributes of Chinese

divinities, representing them in positions and poses which seem

to caricature native deities and sages. There is, for instance, an

ornament in form of a mountain retreat with a shrine in which is

seated a figure in a three-cornered European hat and a Buddha-

like attitude. Another group consists of a European mounted on

a chH-lin, posing as an Arhat, and another of a European standing

on a dragon's head which would symbolise to the Chinese the

attainment of the highest literary honours.

There are, besides, in the British Museum collection figures of

animals and birds, the Buddhist lion, the cock, the hawk, or the

^ Brinkley, China and Japan, vol. ix., p. 274.

* See W. Anderson, Catalogue of the Japanese and Chinese Paintings in the British
Museum, p. 75.

» 0. C. A., p. 628.