Page 197 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

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Fukien Porcelain 113

specimens of the period of active export which extended from about

1650-1750. Naturally they vary greatly in quality, which depends

on the purity and translucence of the ware whether it be cream

or milk white, and on the soft aspect and rich lustre of the glaze.

A large series, which may be taken as representative of the K'ang

Hsi period, was collected by Augustus the Strong, and is still to

be seen at the Johanneum at Dresden ; or, rather, part of it is still
there, for much of that historic collection was given away or pilfered

from time to time, and many specimens with the Dresden cata-

logue numbers engraved are now to be found in our own museums.

Many of the figures at Dresden have evidently been coated with

a kind of black paint, which probably served as a medium for oil

gilding, but this unfired colouring has worn away, and only traces

now remain.

Occasionally one finds among the Te-hua wares a specimen

with dry appearance and crazed or discoloured glaze, defects due

to faulty firing or to burial in damp soil. Such pieces are surprising

in a ware with such apparent homogeneity of body and glaze, and

the crazed examples might be easily mistaken for one of the t'u ting (or

earthy Ting ware) types.

As to the history of the factories, it is expressly stated in the

T'ao III that they were started in the Ming dynasty. No account

need be taken of the few legendary specimens to which tradition

assigns an earlier origin than this, such as the so-called flute of

Yoshitsune, a twelfth-century hero of Japan, and the incense burner

in St. Mark's, Venice, which is reputed to have been brought from

China by Marco Polo. The latter is of the same model as Fig. 3

of Plate 87, perhaps from the same mould, and I have seen at least

Ahalf a dozen others in London. third piece which was long re-

garded as a document is the jewelled white plate in the Dresden

collection, supposed to have been brought back from Syria by a

Crusader in the twelfth century. The story is no doubt apocryphal,

but in any case it has no real bearing on the question, for the plate

is not Fukien ware but a specimen of white Ching-te Chen porcelain
with a " shop mark " in underglaze blue. It has been set with

jewels in India or Persia, like a sixteenth-century bowl in the British
Museum, but the " Crusader plate " is probably a century later.

Brinkley ^ asserts, without giving any authority, that the T6-hua

industry was virtually discontinued at the end of the eighteenth

^ Japan and China, vol. ix., p. 273.

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