Page 480 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

CHAPTER XVIII

FORGERIES AND IMITATIONS

WITH their intense veneration for the antique, it is only
natural that the Chinese should excel in imitative work,
and a great deal of ingenuity has been quite legitimately

exercised by them in this direction. The amateur will sometimes
have difficulty in distinguishing the clever copies from the originals,
but in most cases the material and the finish of the work frankly
belong to a later period, and sometimes all doubt is removed at once
by a mark indicating the true period of manufacture. But the
collector has to be on his guard against a very different kind of
article, the spurious antique and the old piece which has been " im-
proved " by the addition of more elaborate decoration or by an
inscription which, if genuine, would give it historic importance. The
latter kind of embellishment is specially common on the early pot-
teries of the Han and T'ang periods. Genuine specimens taken from
excavated tombs have often been furnished with dates and dedi-
catory legends cut into the body of the ware and then doctored,
to give the appearance of contemporary incisions. But a careful
examination of the edges of the channelled lines will show that
they have been cut subsequently to the firing of the ware, when
the clay was already hard. Had the inscription been cut when the
pot was made, it would have been incised in a soft unfired sub-
stance, like the writing of a stylus in wax, and the edges of the lines
would be forced up and slightly bulging ; and if the ware is glazed,
some of the glaze will be found in the hollows of the inscription.
There are, besides, minor frauds in the nature of repairs. Pieces
of old pottery, for instance, are fitted into a broken Han jar ; the
lost heads and limbs of T'ang figures are replaced from other broken
specimens, and defective parts are made up in plaster. Such addi-
tions are often carefully concealed by daubs of clay similar to that
with which the buried specimen had become encrusted. Further
than thisj Han and T'ang figures have been recently manufactured

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