Page 458 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

282 Chinese Pottery and Porcelain

of China, Li T'ai-po, the great T'ang poet, is represented in drunken
slumber leaning against an overturned wine jar or receiving the

ministrations of the Emperor and his court. He also figures among
the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup, a suitable subject for an

octagonal bowl. Poets, painters, and sages are often seen in moun-
tain landscapes contemplating the beauties of Nature ; two sages
meeting on a mountain side is a frequent subject and is known as the
" happy meeting," or again, it is a single sage, with attendant
carrying a bowl, book, and fan, or sometimes bringing an offering
of a goose. In rare instances these figures can be identified with
Chinese worthies such as Chiang Tzii-ya, who sits fishing on a river
bank, or Chu Mai-ch'en, the wood-cutter, reading as he walks with
his faggots on his back.

The stories of the Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety provide
a complete series of popular subjects, which may be seen in the panels

01 Plate 91, Fig. 3. Women are represented by the Virtuous

Heroines ; by celebrated beauties such as Yang Kuei-fei, consort of
the T'ang ruler Ming Huang,^ and Hsi Shih, the Chinese Delilah who
was the undoing of Fu Ch'ai, prince of Wu, in the fifth century B.C.
by the poetess Tan Hui-pan, and by a hundred nameless figures which
occur in genre designs, and by the idealised beauties, mei jen (grace-
ful ladies), which the Dutch ungallantly dubbed with the name of
lange lijsen or long Elizas. The domestic occupations of a lady
form another series of subjects for polygonal vessels ; and women

—are sometimes seen engaged in the Four Subjects of Study Poetry,
—Rites, History, and Music or in the Four Liberal Accomplishments
— —Writing, Painting, Music, and Checkers but the groups who make

up these scenes are more often composed of men. The game of
checkers or go, which is so often loosely rendered chess, ^ is wei cKi
the " surrounding game," a favourite Chinese amusement, which
figures in two well-known subjects of porcelain decoration. One
of these is the legend of Wang Chih, the Taoist patriarch, watching
the game played by two old men, the spirits of the Pole Stars, in
a mountain retreat ; the other is the story of the general Hsieh An,
who refused to allow the news of an important victory to disturb
his game.

^ A not uncommon subject is the meeting of a young horseman with a beautiful

lady in a chariot, and it has been suggested that this may be the meeting of Ming Huang
and Yang Kuei-fei ; but the identification is quite conjectural.

* Another game, bsiang ch'i (elephant checkers), is far nearer to our chess.