Page 28 - Chinese Art, Vol II By Stephen W. Bushell

CHINESE ART.
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to have a white, translucent, hard paste, not to be scratched by
steel, homogeneous, resonant and vitrified, exhibiting, when
broken, a conchoidal fracture of fine grain and brilliant aspect.
These qualities, inherent in porcelain, make it impermeable
to water, and enable it to resist the action of frost even when un-
coated with glaze. Among the characteristics of the paste given
above transhicency and vitrification define porcelain best. If
either of these two qualities be wanting, we have before us another
kind of pottery ; if the paste possess all the other properties, with
the exception of transhicency, it is a stoneware ; if the paste be
not vitrified, it belongs to the category of terracotta or of faience.
The Chinese define porcelain under the name of (z'/'i, a character
first found in books of the Han dynasty (B.C. 206-A.D. 220), as a
hard, compact, fine grained pottery {t'ao), and distinguish it
by the clear, musical note which it gives out on percussion, and
by the test that it cannot be scratched by a knife. They do not
lay so much stress on the whiteness of the paste, nor on its trans-
lucency, so that some of the pieces may fail in these two points
when the fabric is coarse ; and yet it would be difficult to separate
them from the porcelain class. The paste of the ordinary ware,
even at Ching-te-chen, is composed of more heterogeneous materials
than that fabricated at European factories, and may even be re-
duced in some cases to a mere layer of true porcelain earths (kaolin
and petuntse) plastered over a substratum of yellowish grey clay.
The Chinese always separate, on the other hand, dark-coloured
stonewares, like the reddish yellow ware made at Yi-hsing, in
the province of Kiangsu, known to us by the Portuguese name of
boccaro (see Fig. 3), or the dense brown refractory stoneware pro-
duced at Yang-chiang, in the southern part of the province of
Kwangtung, which is coated with coloured enamels, and is often
put in European collections among the monochrome porcelains.
This last variety, commonly called Kuang Yao, will be referred to
later, and it is illustrated here in Figs. 4, 5, and 6.