Page 483 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

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Mi se ware pan dish silver with medallions of birds, flowers, and
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scrolling foliage. The other bowls are plain, with
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Height 6.1 (27s), diam. 23.8 (9 /s), diam. of foot
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i74(6 A) a grayish huqing (lake green) glaze of the finest
Tang Dynasty, ninth century CE quality.
From the pagoda of the Famen Monastery at Fufeng, Celebrated in literature ever since the ninth
Shaanxi Province century as mi se, the ware's exact nature had long
defied precise identification; the correspondence
Famensi Museum, Fufeng, Shaanxi Province between the inventory stele and the ceramics re-
covered from the pagoda's foundation deposit has
Among sixteen ceramic vessels excavated from the resolved that question. The mi se pieces were fired
middle chamber of the crypt beneath the Famen in a "dragon" kiln (a long kiln built up a slope)
Monastery pagoda, no fewer than thirteen were in a strongly reducing atmosphere, in which the
mi se ("secret color") fine stoneware. Most of them relatively high levels of ferrous oxide and titanium
were contained in a lacquered wooden box, placed oxide, around 2.5 percent, produced both the fine
beneath the large silver censer immediately in front gray-green and the yellowish green glazes. 5
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of the doors leading to the third and innermost The pan shown here, with a five-lobed rim and
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chamber. They had been dedicated in 873 by Em- sides divided by five short straight lines, derives
peror Yizong, and are recorded on stone tablets as from a silverware shape, as do the bowls, dishes,
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follows: "Mi se ci ["porcelain"] bowls: seven items, and the octagonal bottle. (Metalworking techniques
two with silver banded rims; mi se ci pan dishes and similarly inform the inlay of the ceramic silver-
diezi: six items." The ceramics actually found com- banded bowls.) The clay paste forming the body
prise these seven bowls and six dishes, together had been refined to the point where it contained
with a single octagonal fluted bottle, similar to one no sand particles, and the glaze has only a very few
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excavated in the 19505 from a tomb dated 8/i, and tiny gas bubbles. On the base, twenty-four exceed-
two pieces of white stoneware. The two bowls with ingly slender spur marks (four of them somewhat
silver rims, glazed a yellowish green, are coated on larger than the others), form a circle on the base;
the outside with black lacquer inlaid in gold and one of the other pan dishes shows two concentric

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