Page 477 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

Motives of the Decoration 301

A group of three objects consisting of a pencil brush (pi), a cake

of ink (ting) and a ju-i sceptre crossed one over the other (Fig. 4),
occurs both in the field of the decoration and as a mark under

the base. It is a pure rebus, reading pi ting ju i, may things be

fixed {ting) as you wish {ju i, lit. according to your idea). Another
obvious rebus which occurs as a mark (Fig. 5) consists of two
peaches and a bat (double longevity and happiness), and floral
designs are very commonly arranged so as to suggest rebus phrases.

But the Chinese decorator did not always express himself in
riddles. Inscriptions are frequent on all forms of decorative work,
as is only natural in a country where calligraphy ranks among the
highest branches of art. To the foreign eye Chinese writing will not
perhaps appear so ornamental as the beautiful Neshky

characters which were freely used for decorative pur-

poses on Persian wares ; but for all that, its decora-
tive qualities are undeniable, and to the Chinese who
worship the written character it is a most attractive
kind of ornament. Sometimes the surface of a vessel
is almost entirely occupied by a long inscription treat-
ing of the ware or of the decoration which occupies the
remaining part; but more often the writing is limited
to an epigram or a few lines of verse. The characters
as a rule are ranged in columns and read from top to
bottom, the columns being taken from left to right ; and rhyming
verse is written in lines of three, five or seven characters each.
The inscriptions are often attested by the name or the seal of the
author. The Emperor Ch'ien Lung, a prolific writer of verses,

indited many short poems on the motives of porcelain decoration,

and these have been copied on subsequent pieces.
As for the style of writing, the ordinary script is the Jc'ai shu,

—which dates from the Chin dynasty (265 419 a.d.), but there are

besides many inscriptions in which the archaic seal characters
chuan tzU are employed, or at least hybrid modern forms of them
and there is the cursive script, known as ts'ao shu or grass characters,
which is said to have been invented in the first century B.C. The

seal and the grass characters are often extremely difficult to translate,
and require a special study, which even highly educated Chinese
do not profess to have mastered.

Single characters and phrases of auspicious meaning in both
seal form and in the ordinary script occur in the decoration and also