Page 157 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

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of coloured glazes, and for the perfecting of porcelain. Now, no
longer are potters limited to the simple green- and brown-tinted
glazes of the Han. A white ware with blue-green splashes was al-
ready being made in North China under the Northern Ch'i Dy-
nasty (550-577). The fine white earthenware of the T'ang Dy-
nasty is often clothed in a polychrome glaze, made by mixing
copper, iron, or cobalt with a colourless lead silicate to produce a
rich range of colours, from blue and green to yellow and brown;
this glaze is applied more thinly than before, often over a white
slip, is generally very finely crackled, and stops short of the base in
an uneven line. Dishes are stamped with foliate or lotus patterns
and decorated with coloured glazes, which are confined by the in-
cised lines of the central design, whereas elsewhere the colours
tend to run together. The T'ang love of rich effects is seen also in
the marbled wares, made by mixing a white and a brown clay to-
gether and covering the vessel with a transparent glaze. The more
robust T'ang wares were exported to the Near East, where they
were imitated in the poor-quality clays of Persia and Mesopota-
mia. 1 68 Ewer with dancer and dragons in
relief under a polychrome glaze.
There were two main centres for the production of these col- Earthenware. Tang Dynasty.
oured wares in North China. The Sian region made vessels and
figurines with a light buff earthenware body, while kilns in
Honan, using clay with a much higher kaolin content, made wares
with a fine white body akin to porcelain—although a good deal
softer. After the An Lu-shan rebellion of 755 the production of
these coloured wares declined in Shcnsi and Honan, but it contin-
ued in Szechwan, in the newly prosperous city of Yangchow
where the Grand Canal meets the Yangtse River, and in the far
north under the Liao Dynasty.
In the meantime, however, as the north declined the southeast
grew in prosperity. Before the end of the dynasty, Yueh ware had
reached a high pitch of perfection at the Shang-lin-hu kilns near
Hangchow. The body is porcellaneous; bowls and vases (the most 169 Jar decorated with splashed
polychrome glare. Earthenware. T'ang
common shapes) are sometimes decorated with moulded or in- Dynasty.
cised flowers and plants under an olive-green glaze. The soft-bod-
ied North China wares have a flat or slightly concave base, but the
Yueh wares have a fairly high, and often slightly splayed, foot.
It was probably in the Sui Dynasty that the Chinese potters per-
fected true porcelain, by which is meant a hard, translucent ware
fused at high temperature with the aid of a high proportion of fel-
spar, causing it to ring when struck. In 851 a work entitled The
Story of China and India by an unknown author appeared at Basra;
it contained information about the Cantonese supplied by a mer-
chant named Sulaiman, who writes of them: "They have pottery
of excellent quality, of which bowls are made as fine as glass
drinking cups; the sparkle of water can be seen through it, al-
though it is pottery. J Indeed, this white ware was already in de-
mand far beyond China's shores, for fragments of both green
Yueh ware and white porcelain were found in the ruins of the Ab-
basid city of Samarra, which was the summer residence of the cal-
iphs from 836 to 883. Although the site was occupied after that
date, the greater part of the huge quantity of shards belongs to the
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