Page 240 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

consist of nothing but glaze: these are the so-called "bodiless" (t'o-
t'ai) pieces. Almost as beautiful arc the monochromes produced at
Ching-tc-chcn, notably the dishes, stem cups, and bowls deco-
rated in "sacrificial red" (chi-hung) or with imperial dragons under
a yellow or blue glaze.
168 Kuanyin, Fukien Te-hua ware.
White porcelain. Early Ch'ing Dynasty.

TE-HUA WARES Ching-te-chen, though the largest, was by no means the only
Ming factory producing monochrome wares. A white porcelain
was being made at Te-hua in Fukien as early as the Sung Dynasty.
The Fukien wares, indeed, form a race apart. They never bear
reign marks and are extremely difficult to date accurately, while
they range in quality from the finest porcelain with a luminous,
warm, and lustrous glaze with a brownish tint where it runs thick,
to the more metallic products of the last hundred years. In addi-
tion to vessels, boxes, and ceremonial objects such as incense
burners and other bronze shapes, the Te-hua potters modelled fig-
urines in white porcelain, a lovely example being the Kuanyin
from the Barlow Collection at the University of Sussex. Here the
subtle turn of the body and the liquid flow of the drapery show
how much ceramic modelling was influenced by the sweeping lin-