Page 253 - Oriental Series Japan and China, Brinkly

PORCELAIN DECORATED

and such like elaborate decoration, carved in open-

work (ling-lung}, and painted in enamel colours, is

not work of too complicated a kind. He quotes the

ancient emperor Shun, whose vessels are said to have

been unvarnished, and Tu, who refused to chisel his

sacrificial bowls, and he appeals to his sovereign to

imitate them. The result of this memorial was the

lessening by one-half of the quantity of pricket can-
dlesticks, chess-boards, screens, and paint-brush vases.
Such wholesale production accounts for the abundance
of porcelain of this date in Peking, where a street

hawker may be seen with sweetmeats piled on dishes

over a yard in dameter, or ladling iced syrup out of

Ming bowls, and there is hardly a butcher's shop
without a large Ming jar, generally broken, it is true,

on the counter for throwing in scraps of meat. This

is the Ming Tz'u, the porcelain of the Ming dynasty

" par excellence," with good glaze and a brilliant style
of colouring characteristic of the period, but of coarse
paste and often clumsy form, the bottom of the vase

or jar may be unglazed, and the mark of the reign

inscribed outside near the rim."

It may, indeed, be confidently asserted that from
the Western collector's point of view, the use of vitri-
fiable enamels for decorating large pieces, such as
flower-vases, fish-bowls, covered jars and so forth,

came into vogue during the last century of the Ming
dynasty (15501650). The wares of this period are

virtually the only representatives of the dynasty that

have found their way westward. Many of them went

to Japan, where the slightly archaic character of their
decoration gave them value in the eyes of the Tea

Clubs. They were known as Ban-reki Aka-e, or

"red picture ware of Ban-reki" (Chinese Wan-lf), a

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