Page 342 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day
P. 342
194 Chinese Pottery and Porcelain
at the lowest computation the antiquity of these wares is fixed in
the late Ming period. Another group is represented by Plate 58,
Fig. 2. Its characteristics are a comparatively thin buff earthenware
body, soft enough to powder under the knife, and a sparing use of
brownish yellow, bright turquoise, green^ and aubergine glazes of the
usual crackled type applied direct to the body. The specimens
are generally vases or incense burners of curious and archaic forms,
with ornament moulded in low relief, the whole bearing the unmis-
takable signs of a ware which has been pressed in a mould. The
inside and bottom of the incense burners are usually unglazed. The
colours, as a rule, are pleasing and soft, and it is the common
practice to label them indiscriminately Ming. As nothing definite
is known of their place of origin, this chronology can only be based
on their archaistic appearance, or on the fact that they have the
usual " on biscuit " glazes, which seems to be the accepted signal
for a Ming attribution. Needless to say, the use of this method
of colouring survived the demise of the last Ming emperor, and
it is improbable that wares which must be comparatively common
in China (judging from the handsome way in which the quite recently
created demand for them has been answered) should have a minimum
antiquity of two hundred and seventy years.
The fact is that dating of these glazed potteries is as difficult
as that of the cognate glazed tiles, and it is as unreasonable to
exclude a Ch'ing origin as it would be to exclude a Ming. The
balance of probabilities, at any rate, is in favour of the bulk of them
being no older than the eighteenth century.
A third group is also consistently labelled Ming, but with better
reason, though even here a little more elasticity in the dating is
advisable. It has an exact parallel in porcelains of undoubted Ming
origin, viz. those represented by Plate 61, etc., which usually take
the form of jars and vases with designs outlined in fillets of clay, or
channelled or even pierced a jour. The spaces between the out-
lines are filled with coloured glazes which are fired, in the case of
porcelain, in the cooler parts of the biscuit kiln. These are the
glazes de demi-grand feu, according to the French definition, and they
A1 little flask in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Case 24, No. 809, 1883) of this
type of ware with a green glaze was obtained in 1883 in the neighbourhood of Canton.
Possibly a portion of this group comes from one of the Canton factories, but it is the
kind of ware which might have been made in any pottery district, and there are quite
modern examples of the same type of glaze and biscuit in the Field Museum of Chicago
which were manufactured at Ma-chuang, near T'ai-yiian Fu, in Shensi.