Page 115 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

The Sung Dynasty, 960-1279 a.d. 45

The ceramic art now took rank beside that of the bronze worker

and jade carver, and it received a great impetus from regular
Imperial patronage. The Ting Chou and Ju Chou factories in the
north worked under Imperial mandate. In the south the pottery

centre in the Ch'ang-nan district received a new name from the
nien hao of the Emperor Ching Te (1004-1007), and developed

into the world-famed Chiiiir-tc Cbe»>. In the succeeding century

the Imperial factories at Hang Chou were celebrated for the Kuan

yao or royal ware ; and numerous kilns were opened in the eighteen

provinces, successfully following the lead of the Imperial potteries.

Subsequent ages have never ceased to venerate the Sung as
the classic period of Chinese ceramic art, and in the eighteenth

century the Emperor Yung Cheng sent down selected Sung specimens

from the palace collection to be imitated by the Imperial potters
at Ching-te Chen. The same sentiment pervades Chinese ceramic
literature. It harks back perpetually to the Sung wares as the
ideal, collectors rave about them, and eulogy of the Ju, Kuan, Ko,
Ting, and Lung-ch'iJan wares has been almost an obsession ^vith

later Chinese writers.

Until recent years the European student has been almost entirely
dependent for his knowledge of the subject on these literary appre-
ciations or on relatively modern reproductions of the wares. Latterly,

however, the interest aroused among Western collectors in the

earlier wares and their consequently enhanced value have lured

many authentic specimens from China, and our information on

the Sung potteries has considerably expanded. But the diffi-

culties of classification are still only in part surmounted. Many

important problems remain unsolved, and for the understanding of
several celebrated groups we are still at the mercy of Chinese text-
books and encyclopaedias. Obscurity of phrase, ambiguity of colour
words, quotations from early authorities passed on from writer to

writer with diminishing accurac}^ are among the many stumbling-

blocks which the student of these books must surmount at every

turn. Many of the treatises occur in small encyclopaedias and

miscellanies on works of art, which are each merely a corpus of
quotations from similar works of the past. jMoreover, an accurate
first-hand knowledge of the wares themselves does not seem to have
been held essential for the Chinese compiler. It is true that the

same might be said of many of our own art-manuals, and with

less excuse, for the Chinese can at any rate plead the veneration