Page 46 - J. P Morgan Collection of Chinese Art and Porcelain

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

made many collections of books, pictures, rubbings of

inscriptions, bronze and jade antiquities, and other art

objects, of which important illustrated catalogues still

remain, although the collections have long since been

dispersed. During this time the Chinese intellect

would seem to have become, as it were, crystallized,

and Chinese art gradually developed into lines which

it still, for the most part, retains.

The Yuan dynasty (i 280-1 367) was established by

Kublai Khan, a grandson of the great Mongol warrior

Genghis Khan. The Mongols annexed the Uigur Turks

and destroyed the Tangut kingdom; swept over Tur-

kestan, Persia, and the steppes beyond; ravaged

Russia and Hungary; and even threatened the existence

of Western Europe. China was completely overrun

by nomad horsemen, its finances ruined by issues of an

irredeemable paper currency, and its cities handed over

Ato alien governors called darughas. Chinese con-

temporary writer describes the ruin of the porcelain

industry at Ching-te-chen at this time by exorbitant

official taxation, so that the potters were driven away

from the old imperial manufactory there, to start new

kilns in other parts of the province of Kiangsi. Marco

Polo is astonished at the riches and magnificence of

the great khan, who was really a ruler of exceptional

power and made good use of his Chinese conquests.

But the culture which surprised the Venetian traveller

was pre-Mongolian, and its growth was mainly due to

Chinese hands. Even the wonderful cane palace of

—Marco Polo celebrated by Coleridge:

"In Xanadu did Kubia Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree, etc."

was actually the old summer residence of the Sung
emperors at K'ai-feng Fu, in the province of Honan,
which was dismantled and carried away piecemeal to

xxxiv