Page 30 - Oriental Series Japan and China, Brinkly

CHINA

From all this it will be seen that little hope re-

mains of arriving at an accurate decision as to the first
manufacture of translucid porcelain in China. It

seems fair to conclude, however, that although the
keramic art was tolerably widely practised from the

beginning of the Tang dynasty (618), it scarcely
emerged from a mediocre condition until the tenth
century ; that for any purpose higher than the role
of ordinary household utensils, vessels of glass, jade,
or bronze were chiefly employed, and that porcelain

did not make its appearance among the keramic pro-
ductions of the Middle Kingdom until the beginning
of the Sung dynasty (960 A.D.). By and by, evidence
will be adduced to show that Chinese experts, though
thorough masters of the processes of porcelain manu-

facture, deliberately chose fine stone-ware or semi-

porcelain, in preference to hard-paste porcelain, for

some of their greatest tours de force.