Page 340 - Oriental Series Japan and China, Brinkly

CHINA

themselves, though they, too, set no light value on

good specimens. In Japan it was from the first a

strong favourite. It seems to have come to that

country originally from Korea, an accident that led

the Japanese to attribute it to Korean factories and

to call it "Haku-gorai" or "Korean White." The
error still survives. Curiously enough, when Christi-

anity began to take root in Japan, at the end of the
fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century,

statuettes of Kwan-yin (Japanese, Kuan-non} in Ivory-

white porcelain were used as substitutes for images of
Athe Virgin Mary.
remarkable collection of these

statuettes, blackened by fumes of incense, is preserved

in the Imperial Museum of Antiquities in the Ueno

Park, Tokyo, where it forms part of an assemblage of

Christian relics. In some cases the goddess carries a

baby in her arms in others, she is accompanied by
;

two or three children. Thus associated with chil-

dren she is known as Kwan-yin, the Maternal, and from

the association bold inferences have been deduced by

tracers of Buddhistic and Christian affinities. It need

scarcely be observed that a demand in Japan for this
form of Kwan-yin would soon have created a supply.

Solid, beautiful, and manufactured in the very

province where stood Ch'iian-chou-fu, the principal
mart of China's foreign commerce, the Ivory-white
Chien-yao naturally went abroad in considerable quan-
tities. In the Dresden Collection there is preserved
a little plate, said to be of this ware, with uncut
jewels, rubies, and emeralds, let into the paste in gold

filigree. The piece is marked below with the seal

character fuh, in blue under the glaze. It is said to
have been brought by a crusader from Palestine in the
twelfth century. There are two difficulties about this

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