Page 102 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

P'eng-lai which were made to appear at the hunting feasts of the
Han emperors. These reliefs, in which we often find towering
ranges of hills, may well preserve the designs of Han scroll paint-
ings on silk.
In Han times, many people believed that on quitting this world
one could take with him to heaven his family, servants, personal
possessions, domestic animals, and even his house. As these could
not actually accompany him, models (ming-ch'i, literally, bright,
or spirit, utensils) were placed in the tomb, and the custom per-
sisted long after the fall of the Han. 4 Thus, we find in the Han
tombs a retinue of servants and guards, farmhands, musicians,
and jugglers such as its occupant probably never enjoyed in his
lifetime. There were barns with fowl modelled in reliefon the top.
There were watchtowers in several storeys, their wooden beams
and transoms cither indicated by incisions in the clay or painted
red. The house and barns of the South China tombs are raised on
stilts, like those in Southeast Asia today. Farm animals arc mod-
elled with uncanny realism; watchdogs from Szechwan graves are
squat and menacing; those from Changsha, with heads erect and
muzzles quivering, so alert one can almost hear them sniffing.
These figurines are a useful source of information on the daily life,
beliefs, and economy of Han China. The delightful tableau exca-
vated in 1969 from a Western Han tomb at Tsinan, Shantung, de-
picts the kind of entertainment with music, tumblers, and dancers
that was often represented on the walls of tombs and tomb
shrines. They illustrate, too, the extent of China's foreign contacts
i io Watchtowcr. Pottery with green at this time. The pottery stand for a bronze "coin-tree" found in a
glaze. Eastern Han Dynasty. grave in Szechwan, for example, is decorated with a frieze of ele-
phants in relief, modelled with a lively naturalism that has no
counterpart in other Han reliefs but at once calls to mind the ani-
mals of the four quarters carved on the capital of the Asokan col-
umn at Sarnath.
Some of the Han figurines were individually modelled, but the
majority of the smaller pieces were mass-produced in moulds:
though the forms are reduced to essentials, none of their vitality or
character is lost. At Changsha, where the clay was often poor and
glazes apt to flake off, the ming-ch 'i were generally made of painted
wood, which, like the silk and lacquer found in the Changsha
tombs, has miraculously survived the ravages of time.
Of quite a different kind was the fine-quality felspathic stone-
ware, which was made in a number of centres in Chckiang. This
ancestor of the Sung celadons has a hard body and thin glaze rang-
ing in colour from grey to olive-green to brown. It is often called
Yiieh ware, because the type-site is at Chiu-yen near Shao-hsing,
the old name of which is Yuch-chou. Recent Chinese writers con-
fine the term Yiieh ware to the porcellaneous celadon made for the
court of Wu-Yuch in the tenth century A. n. , calling all earlier cela-
dons "old Yiieh" or simply ch'ing tz'u, "green porcelain." How-
ever, in translation this is misleading, as some of it can hardly be
called green, and none of it is true porcelain. In this book, there-
1 1 Dog. Pottery covered with
fore, the term Yiieh ware is retained to cover the whole huge family
reddish-brown glaze. From Changsha.
Hurun. Han Dynasty. of prc-Sung Chckiang celadons. 5
ed material