Page 478 - Oriental Series Japan and China, Brinkly

CHINA

a second firing at reduced temperatures. Yet while
possessing this knowledge, the Chinese expert, in the
great majority of cases, did not depart from his old-
fashioned method of applying the glazing material to
the unstoved piece and subjecting both pate and glaze
to the same degree of temperature. Is it conceivable
that the great technical inconvenience of the latter
process would have been wantonly endured by a
keramist skilled also in the former, unless some com-

pensatory advantage were obtained ? The more

reasonable supposition is, that, though the absorbent
properties of porcelaine degourdie and the ease of glaz-

ing it were well known at Ching-te-chen, the Chi-

nese keramist deliberately chose the incomparably

more troublesome and unsafe plan of applying his
glazes to the unstoved pate, because by no other pro-

cess could he obtain the lustre, depth, and softness so

highly prized by his country's connoisseurs. Japan,
China's pupil and confessedly her inferior in the
technicalities of porcelain manufacture, always used

the su-yaki-gama, or kiln for stoving porcelain before

glazing. Her potters, however, adopted this simpler

process, not wholly from choice, but because the
materials immediately available to them for manu-
facturing the porcelain mass were too refractory to
permit varieties of composition such as those habitu-
ally resorted to in China. In this branch of his art

the Ching-te-chen expert was deeply versed. Some
of his most delicate and beautiful monochromatic

glazes are found, not on true porcelain, but on fine

stone-ware. The Japanese, on the other hand, had

to content themselves with a lower range of technical
excellence, and they naturally eschewed a process
which, in their case, offered no adequate compensa-

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