Page 450 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

278 Chinese Pottery and Porcelain

cup is not furnished with a saucer in European style, but there are
straight-edged trays which serve a similar purpose, holding one or
more cups, and the old tea bowls and wine cups used to be provided
with a circular stand with hollow ring in which the base of the cup
could be inserted. The tea pot itself does not seem to be older than
the Ming dynasty, and before that time tea bowls only had been
used, the vessels with spouts and handles being reserved for wine
and other liquids.

A tiny bowl is the usual form of wine cup, but beside these

there are goblets with deep bowl, and the shallow-bowled tazze with
high stems, like the early Ming " stem cups." For ceremonial
purposes, the wedding cups and libation cups were shaped after
bronze ritual vessels or rhinoceros horn cups ; and wine cups for
ordinary use sometimes take the ornamental form of a lotus leaf
or a flower. The commonest form of wine ewer is the Persian type
with pear-shaped body, long graceful handle and spout. Others
take fanciful forms like that of a peach or aubergine fruit, a gourd
or melon. The peach-shaped ewer with opening under the base is
the original of our Cadogan tea pot, and we need be surprised at
nothing in Chinese art when we find this same principle and prac-
tically the same form in a ewer of T'ang date in the Eumorfopoulos
collection. The tall cylindrical ewers with body jointed like a
bamboo, and the front shaped at the top like a tiara, are used for
sweet syrups.

The Chinese dish is for the most part saucer- shaped. When

over half a foot in diameter it is called p'an, the smaller dishes or

platters being named tieh. There are large dishes for fragrant fruits
to perfume the room, and lotus-leaf shaped dishes for sweetmeats
and various small trays of fanciful form for the dinner table ; and
there are the " supper sets " consisting of a varying number of
ornamental traj^s which can be used separately, or joined together
to form a pattern suggesting a lotus or some other many-petalled

flower.

In addition to the native Chinese forms there is a host of specialised

objects made for export and designed in foreign taste ; such as the
deep bowls with pagoda covers for Siam ; weights to hold down
the corners of a mat for India, in form like a door knob mounted
on a circular base ; narghili bowls and ewers for Persia, besides the
bottle-shaped pipes with mammiform mouthpieces, which some-

times take animal or bird forms such as those of the elephant or