Page 160 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

hats, exposing the face, without a veil. Suddenly, their hair also
was exposed when they broke into a gallop. Some were wearing
men's dress and boots." 5
Something of the gaiety of this courtly life is recaptured in these
pottery figurines. The fairylike slenderness of the Six Dynasties
women gives way in the fashion of the eighth century to an almost
Victorian rotundity—Yang Kuei-fei herself was said to have been
plump. But these women make up in character what they lack in
elegance, while Chinese potters derived much amusement from
caricaturing the extraordinary clothes, the beards and great jut-
ting noses of the foreigners from central and western Asia. The
human figurines were almost always made in moulds, the front
and back being cast separately, while the larger figures and animals
were made in several pieces, generally with the base, or underside
of the belly, left open. Though sometimes left in the slip and
painted, they were most often lavishly decorated with three-col-
our glazes, which in time acquired a minute crackle very difficult
for the forger to imitate.
The most spectacular of the T'ang figurines are the fierce armed
74 Stated woman. Earthenware men who are often represented standing on demons. They may
painted and polychrome-glazed- From a
tomb at Loyang, Honan. T'ang represent actual historical figures. Once, when the emperor T'ai-
Dynaity.
tsung was ill, ghosts started screeching outside his room and
throwing bricks and tiles about. A general Chin Shu-pao, who
claimed that he had "chopped up men like melons, and piled up
corpses like ant-hills," offered, with a fellow officer, to stand
guard outside the imperial sickroom, with the result that the
screeching and brick-throwing abruptly ceased. The emperor was
so pleased that he had the generals' portraits painted to hang on
either side of his palace gate. "This tradition," the T'ang book tells
us, "was carried down to later years, and so these men became
door-gods."*

175 Tomb guardian trampling on a
demon. Earthenware painted and
polychrome-glazed. T'ang Dynasty.