Page 46 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

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14 Chinese Pottery and Porcelain

represent a type quite different from that described as " heaped
and piled," a type in which delicate pencilling was the desideratum,
the designs being slight and giving full play to the white porcelain
ground. It is, in fact, far closer in style to the delicately painted
Japanese Hirado porcelain than to the familiar Chinese blue and
white of the K'ang Hsi period.

Plate 60 illustrates a little flask-shaped vase in the Franks Col-
lection, which purports to be a specimen of Hsiian Te blue and
white porcelain. It has a thick, " mutton fat " glaze of faint
greenish tinge, and is decorated with a freely drawn peach bough in
underglaze blue which has not developed uniformly in the firing.
The colour in places is deep, soft and brilliant, but elsewhere it
has assumed too dark a hue.^ Its certificate is engraved in Chinese
fashion on the box into which it has been carefully fitted hsiian

tz'u pao yUeh ying, " precious moon vase of Hsiian porcelain "
attested by the signature Tzu-ching, the studio name of none other
than Hsiang YUan-p'ien, whose Album has been so often quoted.
Without attaching too much weight to this inscription, which is
a matter easily arranged by the Chinese, there is nothing in the

appearance of this quite unpretentious little vase which is incon-
sistent with an early Ming origin.

On the same plate is a brush rest in form of a log raft, on

which is a seated figure, probably the celebrated Chang - Ch'ien,
floating down the Yellow River. The design recalls a rare silver
cup of the Yiian dynasty, which was illustrated in the Burlington
Magazine (December, 1912). Here the material is porcelain biscuit
with details glazed and touched with blue, and the nien hao of
Hsiian Te is visible on the upper part of the log beside two
lines of poetry. Whether this brush rest really belongs to the
period indicated or not, it is a rare and interesting specimen.

Two other possible examples of Hsiian Te blue and white are

described on p. 32.

As to the other types of Hsiian ware named in the Po wu yao
Ian, with one exception I can find no exact counterpart of them in

existing specimens, though parts of the descriptions are illustrated
by examples of apparently later date. Thus the form of the white
tea cups, " with rounded body, convex base, and thread-like
foot," is seen in such bowls as Fig. 1 of Plate 74, which is proved
by its mount to be not later than the sixteenth century. Other

^ Probably due to over-firing.