Page 56 - J. P Morgan Collection of Chinese Art and Porcelain

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

and Han dynasties had previously been moulded with

dates and felicitous formulae, so that it was easy to ex-
tend the practice to pottery vessels of similar ma-
terial, fired, maybe, at the same kiln.

Pottery has always been an important adjunct
to Chinese architecture; buildings being faced, out-
side as well as inside, with slabs of colored faience,

while the roofs are decorated with moulded antefixal

ornaments of grotesque character, and covered with en-
amelled tiles, colored in obedience to strict sumptuary

laws. The famous porcelain tower of Nanking, now
razed to the ground, was a well-known example. The
colors employed in China are powdered glazes m^de
with a lead flux, and the method of application is like
that of the firing of salt-glazed ware in Europe. The

glazes used at the imperial factories near Peking are five
in number: a deep purplish blue derived from cobalt
and manganese silicates, a rich green from copper
persilicate, a yellow approaching the tint of the yolk
of an egg from antimony, a sang de bceuf red from cop-
per mixed with a deoxidising flux, and a charming
turquoise blue obtained from copper combined with

nitre. The five-fold combination is intended to sug-

gest the five jewels of the Buddhist paradise.

The date of the introduction of glaze into the Chinese
ceramic field is unknown, although it would appear to
have been earlier than that of the use of glass by them
as an independent fabric for vessels. It goes back
certainly to the Han dynasty (b.c. 2o6-a.d. 220), during
which green-glazed pottery came into vogue, and the
art was revived early in the fifth century by certain
artisans who are recorded to have come from the

Yueh-ti, an Indo-Scythian kingdom on the frontier
of India, and to have introduced into China new methods

of compounding Uu-li, or colored glazes. The vessels
of green-glazed faience that have just been referred

to are of archaic form, modelled after bronze designs

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