Page 27 - Oriental Series Japan and China, Brinkly

PORCELAIN AND POTTERY

ably did not begin to assume large dimensions previous

to the Tang dynasty. Clumsy copper censers and

other sacrificial implements, imitating the then archaic

style of the Chan dynasty, monopolised the attention

of the rich, together with the so-called precious mate-
Arials.
large portion of the latter came from Ta-

ts'in, and glass is in all the older records mentioned
"
among them." Had Dr. Hirth written keramic,"

instead of " industry, there would have
porcelain,"

been nothing to question in this opinion. The Chi-

nese do not seem to have turned their attention seri-

ously to keramics until, as in Japan four centuries
later, the growing popularity of tea, under the Tang

dynasty (618907), provided a new function for ves-

sels of faience. Glass was then comparatively out of

fashion. Its composition had become known to the
Chinese about 430 A.D., and they already excelled in

its manufacture. Thenceforth glazed pottery or fine
stone-ware became the national taste, until, in the

tenth or eleventh century, porcelain was discovered.

Du Sartel, in his " Porcelaine de Chine," says that

under the Tang dynasty (618907), the termj)/tf0 was

substituted for tao in describing the keramic produc-
tions of the era, and concludes that the substitution

may be taken as indicating the first manufacture of
true porcelain. Neither the fact upon which this

inference is founded nor the inference itself can be

accepted. As far back as the Wei dynasty (220265),

the ideograph yao was used with reference to pottery ;

and in comparatively modern times, when the dis-

tinctive meaning of the two ideographs did any

distinction really exist in the sense indicated by M. du

Sartel would have been fully recognised, the term
yao was applied to boccaro ware, which cannot for a

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