Page 26 - Chinese porcelains collected by Mr. and Mrs. Charles P. Taft, Cincinnati, Ohio, by John Getz

HISTORICAL

lain of the hidden color." M. Julien described it as blue, although it is
more likely to be the wonderful bluish-green celadon made at Jiichou,

described by other writers as superior to the Imperial " Kuan-yao " and

" Ko-yao." The glaze is described in an old Chinese manuscript of the
sixteenth century, by a native collector, who saw a specimen of this porce-

lain during his life, as of a " pale-green color, clear and lustrous, like
a precious emerald in tint, the whole surface covered with marks like
those on cracked ice." From the often defective translations of Chinese
descriptions of porcelains made under this dynasty and the following

short dynasties (from 907 to 953), we can only gather that most of
these objects were modeled after ancient bronze vessels, cind are now
doubtless extinct, so that it may be truly said that literary evidence only

of such porcelains exists to-day.

Under the posterior Chou dynasty (A.D. 954-959) the Emperor Shih-
tsung (Ch'ai-tsong) gave his family name to a certain hard-paste porce-
lain made during his reign, which was also termed " Ju-yao" (Imperial
porcelain), and later, under Sungs, was called "Ch'ai-yao." It was this
sovereign who issued an order, famous in ceramic literature, "that porce-
lain for the palace should thenceforth be made the color of the sky as
seen between clouds after a rain." Chinese authors state that this color
was " blue as the sky," " brilliant as a mirror," " thin as paper," and
"resonant as a Khang" (a musical stone of polished jade), and that it
also was " distinguished for its fineness and crackle." It is further
recorded that those objects in porcelain of Ch'ai (" Ch'ai-yao ") ^ were
so prized in subsequent years that fragments thereof were set in gold and
worn as personal omament.

During the long and remarkable dynasty of the Sungs (A.D. 960-1259)
the manufacture of porcelain received considerable attention from the court,
and attained an artistic development that was appreciated only in later

^ The colored glazes referred to in this epoch " clair de lune " ; and it is assumed that it was
this latter-colored glaze which was then desig-
cind the beginning of the Sung, other than green nated as " ju " porcelain, or " Ch'ai-yao," after
or so-called celadons, were purple, black, ivory-
this Ejnperor's family neune.
white, and the pale blue called by the Chinese
" moonlight " and by the Western collectors