Page 10 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

inscriptions, for use in Lamaist ceremonies involving the Emperors, or to be offered as

diplomatic gifts. The artisans responsible for these various projects uniformly took a
Tibetan/Nepalese style as their basis, but gave it a distinctive Chinese inflection. The
sinicization can be seen most clearly in the proportions and the balanced order, which are
consistent with architecture and decorative arts of the same period.
One celebrated Buddhist monument symbolized international contacts of a different

kind. During the Yongle and Xuande reigns, the court sponsored seven maritime expeditions
to the West under the command of a eunuch admiral, Zheng He (1371-1433). Zheng's fleets
extended the presence of the Ming empire beyond the Indonesian archipelago and the south-

east Asian peninsula, to the Indian sub-continent and the Persian Gulf. They are known to
have included ships bearing cargoes of porcelain: some of the many early fifteenth century
ceramics which have survived in Indian and Middle Eastern collections must derive from
these extraordinary missions, though the bulk may simply bear witness to the continuing
activity of Middle Eastern merchants in China under the Ming. In 1412, after the successful

return of the first three of these great fleets, the Yongle emperor commissioned a
commemorative pagoda for the Temple of Precious Benevolence, Bao’en si, in Nanjing.
Completed in 1419, it was faced entirely with sculpted porcelain tiles lead-glazed in strong

colors, using the cosmopolitan decorative vocabulary of Lamaist art in its Chinese version.
Until its destruction in the nineteenth century and the dispersal of its surviving tiles into
different collections, the "Porcelain Pagoda" was one of the architectural wonders of China,
known as far away as Europe.
Zheng He, however, was himself a Moslem from Yunnan whose father had made the

pilgrimage to Mecca. The Chinese court's recognition of Islamic countries in this period,
already clear from the successive maritime expeditions, is strikingly attested by porcelain
copies of Islamic metalwork (485). Chinese archaeologists have suggested that these were

intended as diplomatic gifts to the countries which had presented the original metal objects.
While the identity of these countries is not certain, it is known that various Central Asian
principalities engaged in tribute trade with China, from which they gained porcelain and
textiles. To the east, meanwhile, China notably sent textiles and laquers to Japan, and
porcelain to Korea.

CHENGHUA TO ZHENGDE (1464-1521)

By the middle of the fifteenth century, the two southern cities of Nanjing and Suzhou
had emerged as rivals to Beijing in cultural importance. Their rise to independent prominence