Page 261 - Chinese Art, Vol II By Stephen W. Bushell

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ENAMELS, ETC.
75
Karakorum in Mongolia became the place of rendez-vous of a crowd
of political envoys, Roman Catholic and Nestorian missionaries,
merchants and adventurers coming from all parts of the western
world. There was a Mohammedan quarter in Karakorum, and a
number of residents collected there from Syria and Muscovy after
the Mongolian invasion of these countries. When the friar William
de Rubruc arrived at Karakorum in the year 1231, the first persons he
"
met were, he tells us, maitre Guillaume Boucher, orfevre Parisien,
qui avait demeure sur le Grand-Pont a Paris," and " ime femme
de Metz en Lorraine, nommee Paquette, qui avait ete faite prison-
niere en Hongrie " : this Guillaume was the court jeweller of the
great Khan who was soon to become emperor of China.
As we saw above, the art of enamelling was brought independently
to the south of China by the Arabs a century or more later, when
we first hear of the Ta Shih Yao, or Arabian enamelled ware, and
are told that it resembled the Fo-lang Ch'ien, the " Byzantine
incrusted work." This record proves that the cloisonne enamels of
Constantinople were already known in the fourteenth century to
the Chinese, and available for comparison with the enamels brought
to China at the time by the Arab ships. M. Paleologue is doubtless
right in his conclusion in L'Art Chinois (page 231) that the Chinese
learned the cloisonne art from a succession of workmen, travelling
across the whole of Asia, and setting up workshops in the great
towns they visited, just as did, under nearly the same conditions,
the small colonies of Syrian craftsmen who overran France during
the Merovingian epoch, and introduced there in the same way
various Byzantine methods of work. He adds that the careful
study of the most ancient Chinese cloisonnes reveals intrinsic
proofs of their western origin :
" The workmanship presents occasionally, in fact, striking resemblances
to certain enamels of the Byzantine school: the mixture of difterent enamels
inside the wall of the same cell,— the employment of gold incrustations in the
treatment of the figures and the hands, etc."
S94I. -i F