Page 178 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

92 Chinese Pottery and Porcelain

T'ang had many wonderful porcelains," the story runs, " when
this vessel arrived, they all, without exception, made way for it.
And so throughout the land when men discuss porcelains, they

give the first place to T'ang's white incense vase. T'ang, they say,

did not readily allow it to be seen." And in this respect, if all
accounts are true, T'ang was not unlike a good many Chinese

collectors of the present day.

On the other hand, the Ting ware was often marred by certain

blemishes which are not always easy to understand. The " awns "

{mang), for instance, which degraded it at Court in favour of the

Ju Chou ware in the early Sung period were probably flaws in
the glaze. The " bamboo thread brush marks " mentioned in the
Liu ch'ing jih cha^ may perhaps be lines left in the glaze which
was applied by means of a bamboo brush. Three other defects
which rendered the ware comparatively worthless are named in
the Ko ku yao lun,^ viz. mao (thatch), rnieh (bamboo splints),

and ku cliu (bare bones). The author fortunately explains that
(1) to thatch {mao) means to cover over defects, (2) bamboo splints
(mieh) is used of lines and recalls the brush marks mentioned above,
^nd (3) bare bones {ku ch'u) are patches where the glaze is defec-
tive and the body shows through. Ku, in the sense of " body or
biscuit," we are further informed, is a " curio-market expression."
Modern collectors will probably not be so fastidious as the Chinese

of the fourteenth century, and will welcome a Sung specimen of
Ting porcelain, even though it suffer from mang and ku cliu.

The yai ting and the t^u ting, the fine and coarse white varieties,
alone have been identified in Western collections ; but there are
coloured Ting porcelains which are known to us by literary refer-

ences. An apocryphal red Ting ware ^ {hung ting) is mentioned in

two passages of ambiguous meaning which need not necessarily
have implied a true red glaze. In any case it finds no place in

the older works, such as the Ko ku yao lun and Ch'ing p'i isang,

which only speak of purple or brown {tzu) Ting, and black Ting.

1 See T'ao shuo, bk., ii., fol. 7.
* Bk. vii., fol. 23.

* The Memoir of Chiang (see p. 159), written in the Yiian dynasty, says that the
" pure white ware of Ching-te Chen in the Sung dynasty, when compared with the
red porcelain (hung tz'a) of Chen-ting and the Lung-ch'iian green ware, emulated
these in beauty." Ch§n-ting is the ChSn-ting Fu, the prefectural town of Ting Chou,
and the ware indicated is no doubt Ting ware ; but here the comparison clearly seems
to be between white wares, and unless the word hung (red) applies to some variety of

the Ting biscuit as distinct from the glaze, it is difTicult to understand.