Page 266 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

was sacked by the Taiping rebels in 1853. Thereafter, there was a
revival under T'ung-chih (1 862-1 873), and a further revival has
taken place in the twentieth century. Today the factories at Ching-
te-chen are run on modern industrial lines, but care is being taken
to preserve the skills and techniques of the traditional potters.
While the Imperial Kilns were concentrating on an ever greater
technical perfection, it was the provincial factories in the south
which most successfully maintained their vigour and vitality. Of
the scores of these kilns we can only mention a few. I-hsing in
Kiangsu specialised in the production of little vessels, made of red
stoneware, for the scholars table, most ingeniously fashioned in
the form of plants, tree trunks, beetles, rats, and other creatures,
and in the manufacture of teapots. Te-hua continued to make the
fine white porcelain developed in the Ming Dynasty. Other pro-
vincial wares were made either for local use or for shipment to re-
gions less exacting in their demands than the Europeans. This ap-
plies particularly to the vulgar but vigorous brown stonewares
made at Shekwan, near Fatshan in Kwangtung, consisting chiefly
of ornamental pieces, figures, and largejars decorated with a thick
blue glaze streaked and flecked with grey and green, which since
the Ming Dynasty had both gratified local taste and been exported
in quantity to the Nan-hai.
About the year 1680, K'ang-hsi set up workshops in the palace
precincts for the manufacture of porcelain, lacquer ware, glass,
enamel, furniture, jade, and other objects for court use. The por-
celain project, intended to replace distant Ching-te-chen, was
found impracticable and soon abandoned, but the other work-
shops turned out a variety of decorative arts of superb quality and
continued in production for the rest of the dynasty. The finest
pieces ofjade carving arc often assigned, with very little reason, to
the reign of Ch'ien-lung. Carved jade is extremely difficult to
date, and work of the highest quality has been produced right up
to the present day.
Other factories supplied the needs of the wealthy middle class
and of the export market. Peking and Soochow, for example, spe-
cialised in carved lacquer, Foochow and Canton in the painted
sort. The Canton products were considered inferior both in China
and abroad because they were often made hastily to meet the de-
mands of European merchants who were only permitted to reside
in Canton for a few months of the year. The Foochow lacquer
folding screens and cabinets, with their bold carving and rich col-
ours embellished with powdered gold, were exported not only to
Europe but also to Russia, Japan, Mecca, and India. So many were
transshipped from the Coromandel Coast of South India that this
kind of lacquer became known in eighteenth-century England as
Coromandel ware.
K'ang-hsi's glass factory turned out a wide variety of coloured
glass bottles and vases, the specialty being an opaque glass lami-
nated in several contrasting colours, through which the designs
were carved by the intaglio method. "Snuff bottles" (originally