Page 239 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

266 Kraak ware dish and two krndi
(drinking flasks), export ware, Porcelain
decorated in undergluc blue. Late Ming
period.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, Ching-te-chcn had become CHING-TE-CHEN
the greatest ceramic centre in China. It was ideally situated near
the Poyang Lake, whence its products could go by lake and river
to Nanking and by the Grand Canal to Peking. An apparently
inexhaustible supply of china clay lay in the Ma-ch'ang hills
nearby, while just across the river at Hu-t'ien was to be found the
other essential ingredient in the manufacture of porcelain,
namely, "china stone" (tz'u-shih, often called pai tun-tzu when in
its prepared form). By this time there had evolved out of the
nearly white ch'ing-pai and shu-jii wares of Sung and Yuan a true
white porcelain, which was perhaps already being made at the im-
perial factory for the Hung-wu emperor. The most beautiful
pieces, however, were those made in the Yung-lo period, most of
which arc decorated with motifs incised or painted in white slip
under the glaze—a technique aptly called an-hua ("secret decora-
tion"), for it is scarcely visible unless the vessel is held up to the
light. From the technical point of view, the eighteenth-century 267 "Monk's hat"jug. Porcelain
covered with |MMM-Amf a "precious
white glaze is perhaps more perfect, but it lacks the luminous stone red," glaze. Ch'ien-lung
inscription of 1 775 engraved on the
warmth of the Ming surface. In some Yung-lo bowls the porcelain
base. Ming Dynast)', Hsiian-te period
body is pared down to paper-thinness so that the vessel appears to (1424-1435).