Page 198 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

have a lovely, cloudy blue-green colour, the Jananese gave the
name kinuta ("mallet"), perhaps after the shape of a particularly
famous vase. Almost every shape appears in the Lung-ch'iian rep-
ertoire: many are purely ceramic, but we also encounter adapta-
tions of archaic bronze forms, notably incense burners in the form
of the three- and four-legged ting—a mark of that antiquarianism
which was now begining to develop in Chinese court art and was
I to have an ever-increasing influence on cultivated taste.
We can trace the development of the Chekiang celadons
through dated pieces well into the Ming Dynasty, when the pot-
ting becomes heavier, the glaze greener and more glassy, and the
scale more ambitious.
Celadon, including coarser varieties made in South China,
bulked large in China's export trade from the Southern Sung on-
ward. Of the over six thousand pieces recovered from a ship des-
tined for Japan that went down off Sinan, South Korea, shortly
after 133 [, most were celadons. The ware has turned up in sites
from New Guinea and the Philippines to East Africa and Egypt,
while, as every amateur knows, it was much in demand among
Arab potentates, partly perhaps because it was believed to crack or
change colour if poison touched it.
214 Vise, Lung-ch'uan {kinuta) ware
Stoneware with grey-green celadon Also exported in large quantities (although it was originally a
glare Southern Sung Dynasty. purely domestic ware) was a beautiful translucent porcelain with a
granular, sugary body and pale bluish glaze. Some doubt as to its
respectability in Chinese ceramic history was long caused by the
fact that the name for it used in the West is ying-ch'ing, a recent
term which was invented by Chinese dealers to describe its shad-
owy blue tint, and for which scholars had searched in vain in
Chinese works. In fact, its original name, ch'ing-pai ("bluish-
white"), occurs frequently in texts going back to the Sung Dy-
nasty—although Chinese writers are very inconsistent, and the
term may on occasion, in later periods at least, have meant blue
and white. Because of its high felspar content, the hard clay could
be potted in shapes of wonderful thinness and delicacy. The tra-
dition, which began humbly in the T'ang kilns at Shih-hu-wan
some miles to the west of Ching-te-chen, achieved a perfect bal-
ance between living form and refinement of decoration in the
Sung wares, whose shapes included teapots, vases, stem cups, and
bowls, often with foliate rim and dragons, flowers, and birds
moulded or incised with incredible lightness of touch in the thin
paste under the glaze. Already in the Sung Dynasty ch'ing-pai
wares were being imitated in many kilns in South China, and a
good proportion of their output was exported to Southeast Asia
and the Indonesian Archipelago, where the presence of ch'ing-pai,
215 Va*e, ch'ing-pai or ying-ch'ing ware. celadon or the white wares of Te-hua in Fukien in an archaeologi-
White porcelain. Southern Sung
Dynasty. cal site often provides the most reliable means of dating it.
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