Page 114 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

44 Chinese Pottery and Porcelain

connoisseurs and collectors. Treatises were written on artistic

subjects, encyclopaedias were published, and illustrated catalogues

issued by the order of the Emperor and his followers. Among the

best known of these last publications are the Hsilan Ho po ku t'u In,

" Illustrated discussion of the antiquities in the palace of Hslian

KuHo," and the yii Vu p'u, " Illustrated description of ancient

jade." It is true that modern criticism has seriously impugned

the archaeological value of both these classic works. It is said that

ingenious conjectures and reconstructions, based on the reading

of earlier literature, too often take the place of practical archaeology

and first-hand knowledge of the art of the Shang and Chou dynasties.

Sung archaeology, in fact, appears to have been in much the same

theoretical condition as the Homeric criticism in Europe before

the days of Sehliemann. But for us these works must always have

great interest, if only for the records they preserve of T'ang and

Sung ideas. An excellent, if extreme, instance of the inherent weak-

ness of Sung archaeology is given by Laufer.^ In describing certain

objects of the Chou dynasty early writers had been in the habit of
speaking of " grain pattern " and " rush pattern," assuming a

knowledge in their readers which subsequent ages did not possess.

In the Sung period the current ideas with regard to these patterns

were expressed by the illustrator of the Sung edition of the Li Chi

by ornamenting jade discs, in the one case with ears of wheat and

in the other with a clump of rushes. Modern archaeologists have

identified the patterns in question on objects found in Chou burials,

the grain pattern being symbolically rendered by a number of small

raised discs, representing either grains of corn or heaps of grain,

and the rush pattern by a kind of matting diaper, geometrically

drawn. This instance serves to illustrate the salient differences

between the Chou and Sung art, the two extremes ; the Chou art
is symbolical and geometrical, the Sung impressionist and natural-

istic. The Sung poets and painters ^ communed with Nature in the

wilds and threw into their verse or on to their silks vivid impressions

and ideal conceptions of the natural phenomena. The Chinese

art of after years owes many of its noblest inspirations to Sung

masters, but nowhere are these ideas developed with the same fresh-

ness and power as in the Sung originals.

The Sung dynasty was an age of achievement for the potter.

^ Jade, op. cit., p. 17.

* See L. Binyon, Painting in the Far East, chap. ix.