Page 23 - Oriental Series Japan and China, Brinkly

PORCELAIN AND POTTERY

point les porcelaines bleaes etaient estimees, il suffit

de rappeler qu'on les appelait Kuan-ki vases des
y

magistrats." Now, the fact is that decoration in

blue under the glaze retained all the characteristics

of a most rudimentary manufacture throughout the

Sung dynasty ; that the colour erroneously translated
" blue " by Julien, referred to the glaze itself, not to

the decoration, and that the Kuan-ki never included

ware having blue designs sous couverte. The whole

import of these misconceptions will be presently ap-

preciated by the reader. Their number, and the very

false conclusions to which they led Julien, Jacque-

mart, and other less notable writers, have contributed

to obscure a subject already sufficiently perplexing.

The annals of the Middle Kingdom attribute the

infancy of the keramic art either to the reign of

Huang-ti, or to that of Shun, semi-mythical sover-

eigns who are supposed to have flourished some
twenty-five centuries before the Christian era. Of

these very early wares tradition does not tell anything

that can be taken seriously or that need be recorded

here. They were doubtless rude, technically defec-

tive and inartistic types. At a later date it is stated
Wuthat
Wang, founder of the Chou dynasty 1 2th

(

century B.C.), appointed a descendant of the Emperor

Shun to be director of pottery, and in a record of the

same dynasty the processes of fashioning on the wheel

and moulding are described. The pieces produced

appear to have been funeral urns, libation jars, altar

dishes, cooking utensils, and so forth. The same an-

nals add that these manufactures were earthen ves-

sels, and that they were called pi-ki, or vases of pottery.

More than nine hundred years later (B.C. 202), there

is talk of another species of ware called tao-ki which

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