Page 119 - Chinese Art, Vol II By Stephen W. Bushell

PORCELAIN. 21

Beginning with the Stmfi dynasty, which reigned from 960 to
1280, when it was overthrown by Kublai Khan, the grandson of the
famous Genghis Khan and the founder of the Yuan dynasty, which
ruled China til! it was in its turn succeeded by the native Ming
dynasty in the year 1368, we have a ceramic period marked generally
by the primitive aspect of its productions. Actual specimens of the
time arc now ava'lable for comparison with the descriptions of the
writers on porcelain and the illustrations of the artists in the old
albums which have come down to us. The most useful of these
last is the album of the sixteenth century, in four vokimcs, from
the Peking library of the hereditary Princes of Yi, described by me
in the Journal of the Peking Oriental Society for 1886, which has been
often cited since. This album, entitled Li tai ming tz'n I'ou p'tt,
" Illustrated Description of the Celebrated Porcelain of Different
Dynasties," was the work of Hsiang Yuan-p'ien, a well-known
connoisseur and collector of his time, and its eighty-three illustra-
tions were drawn and coloured by himself. The seal in antique
script of Mo-lin Shan jen attached to his preface gives his literary
"
title A dweller in the hills of Mo-lin," and is identical with the
vermilion stamp reproduced in Fig. 125, with which Hsiang
guarantees, as a critic, the early picture of Ku K'ai-chih now in
the British Museum.
The ceramic productions of the Sung and Yuan dynasties are
rightly classed together by M. Grandidier, whose classification
it is proposed to follow here, arranged as it is in chronological order
after a Chinese model. It comprises five fairly well marked ceramic
classes, and as a rule it will not be found difficult to decide from the
style, from the method of decoration, or from the colours employed,
to which class a particular piece belongs.

Chronological Classification.
I. Primitive Period, including the Sung dynasty (960-1279)
and the Yuan dynasty (1280-1367).