Page 102 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

38 Chinese Pottery and Porcelain

colour." Yiieh Chou is the modern Shao-hsing Fu in the province

of Chekiang. It was celebrated in the tenth century for a special

Wuware made exclusively for the princes of and Yiieh, of the

Ch'ien family, who reigned at Hung Chou from 907 to 976. This

was the pi se or " secret colour " ware which was made at Yiieh

Chou until the Southern Sung period (1127-1279), when the manu-

facture was removed to Yii-yao.^ The pi se ^ ware has caused end-

less mystification among writers on Chinese porcelain. The name

— —which means literally " secret colour " has been taken by some

to imply that the colour was produced by a secret process (the

most natural but not the generally accepted meaning), and by

others that it was a forbidden colour, i.e. only permitted to be

used by the princely patrons of the house of Ch'ien.^ The author
of the Ching-te Chen fao lu * states that " it resembled the Yiieh

ware in form, but surpassed it in purity and brilliance." This is,

however, only the opinion of a nineteenth-century writer who does

Anot claim to have seen a specimen of either. tenth-century

writer^ makes use of the vague expression, " the secret colour pre-

serves the note of the green {chHng) ware (i^'w)," which apparently

means that the secret-colour glaze did not rob the ware of the

musical quality of usual chHng ware, implying a difference of some

kind between the pi se and the ch'ing glaze.

Literary references of this kind are open to so many inferences

that their value is slight without some tangible specimen to help

us to realise their import. This difficulty is greatly increased in

dealing with Chinese descriptions because of the ambiguity of

Chinese colour words, which is discussed elsewhere. But in the

case of Yiieh Chou ware, or at any rate of one kind of it, we have

fisher" (Giles), and it seems to have been used indifferently to express a'bluish green
colour and greenish blue like turquoise. In Lu Kuei-meng's poem it suggests the

colour of distant hills. A passage in a seventeenth-century work, the Ch'i sung fang

shih hsiao lu (quoted in the Tao lu, bk. ix., fol. 8), seems to imply that there were

lustrous reflections in the glaze of some of the Yiieh wares. It runs, " Yiieh yao cups
with small feet are of the light green (ch'ing) of the chestnut husk ; when turned side-

ways they are the colour of emerald green jade (/ei is'ui)."

1 See Julien, op. cit., p. 10. ^ifil'£-

^ See T'ao shuo, bk. ii., fol. 5 recto, quoting the Sung work, Kao chai man lu, and

T'ao lu, bk. ix., fol. 9, quoting a twelfth-century work, the Ch'ing pi tsa chih, " The pi se

vessels were originally the wares offered daily to the house of Ch'ien when it ruled

over the country. No subject was allowed to have them. That is why they were

called pi si."

* Bk. v., fol. 4 recto. ^ See T'ao shuo, bk. ii., fol. 5 verso.