Page 466 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

290 Chinese Pottery and Porcelain

symbols used in porcelain ornament ; and among the landscapes

will be found the gardens of Hsi Wang Mu and Mount P'eng-lai,^

one of the three islands of the blessed, situated in the ocean east

of China. Here the fountain of life flows in a perpetual stream :
" the pine, the bamboo, the plum, the peach, and the fungus of

longevity grow for ever on its shores ; and the long-haired tortoise

disports in its rocky inlets, and the white crane builds her nest on

the limbs of its everlasting pines." ^ Presumably, too, the Shou

Shan is situated on this delectable island and perhaps also the
;

heavenly pavilion {fien fang), which appears among clouds as the

goal to which a crane is often seen guiding some of the Taoist genii.

Possibly, too, the conventional border of swirling waves punctuated

by conical rocks carries a suggestion of the rocky islands of paradise

rising from the sea.

There are besides many primitive

beliefs traceable for the most part to
Nature-worship, which prevailed in China

long before the days of Confucius, Lao-

tzu or Buddha. Some of these have

been incorporated in the later religious

systems, especially in that of Taoism,

which was ready to adopt any form of

^^'^ ^° demonology. The oldest system is that
Pa-k expounded by the legendary Fu Hsi, in

which the phenomena of Nature were explained by reference to the

mystic diagrams revealed to him on the back of a dragon horse

{lung ma) which rose from the Yellow River, These are the pa-kua

or eight trigrams formed by the permutations of three lines, broken

and unbroken, as in Fig. 1. A more common arrangement of them

is according to the points of the compass, and enclosing another

ancient device, the Yin-yang, a circle bisected by a wavy line, which

symbolises the duality of Nature, yin being the female and yang

the male element.

Demons abound in Chinese superstitions, and the demon face

appears early in art on the ancient bronzes, from which it was some-

times borrowed by the porcelain decorator. This is the face of the

i'ao t'ieh (the gluttonous ogre) supposed originally to have repre-

sented the demon of the storm, and as such appropriately appear-

ing against a background of " cloud and thunder " pattern, as the

1 The Japanese Mt. Horai. * See Hippisley, Catalogue, op. cit., p. 392.