Page 217 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

23 8 Wine jar. While porcelain decorated with openwork panels and
painting in underglaze red and blue. Excavated at Pao-ting. Hopci. Yuan
Dynasty.
of vases in the Pcrcival David Foundation in London, dedicated to
a temple in Kiangsi in 1 35 1 , which show a mature handling of this
difficult technique. The earliest textual reference—if indeed the
term ch'ing-hua ("blue-green flower") means blue and white, and
not some other ware—occurs in the Ko-ku yao-lun of 13 87-1 3 88,
which dismisses it, along with five-colour wares, as "very vul-
gar." The general opinion is that the technique was developed at
Ching-te-chen at the beginning of the fourteenth century. It may
have been influenced by a technique brought from Persia to the
early Mongol capital at Karakoram in the thirteenth century and
thence transmitted to China.
The pieces that can with confidence be dated in the Yuan period
include large, boldly decorated dishes, pear-shaped vases, ewers
and flasks in Near Eastern shapes, bowls, and stem cups. Decora-
tion includes Near Eastern ogival panels and Chinese dragons, lo-
tus and chrysanthemum scrolls, and narrower bands of petals
some of which had already appeared in the Ch'i-chou wares of the
Southern Sung. By the time the David vases were made, the pot-
ters and painters at Ching-te-chen had fully mastered their art, and
the vases and dishes of the next hundred years are unequalled for
their splendour of shape and beauty of decoration. The drawing is
free and bold, yet delicate, the blue varying from almost pure ul-
tramarine to a dull, greyish colour with a tendency to clot and turn
black where it runs thickest—a fault that was eradicated by the six-
teenth century and cleverly imitated in the eighteenth.