Page 348 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

^

198 Chinese Pottery and Porcelain

in antique bronze style and in the bronze forms of beakers and
four-legged incense burners. The glaze is usually leaf green, but it
often breaks out into a frothy grey scum, such as is seen on some

of the Canton and Yi-hsing glazed pottery. It is a common practice

to label these wares as T'ang, but I am inclined to place them in

a much more recent period (seventeenth or eighteenth century),
and to locate them among the miscellaneous Kuangtung wares,

pending further information on the subject.
There are other specimens with a somewhat similar white and

relatively soft body material, not glazed but stained with a brown-
ish black dressing of clay, and somewhat recalling bronze. These

are usually vases of elegant, well-moulded form, such as Plate 56,

Fig. 3, and they are often marked Nan hsiang Vang.^ They are,

no doubt, of relatively modern make.

Though it would be easy to suggest many possible places of

origin for these wares, such speculation can be of no real value

without far more definite evidence than we possess at present.

Still, it may serve some useful purpose in the future, if not at once,

if we add one or two more records, however meagre, to the exist-
ing lists of Chinese potteries. The section of the T'w shu, which

is devoted to T'ao kung (the pottery industry), mentions the follow-
ing factories as of some importance in the Ming dynasty. In the
province of Honan, in addition to the well-known potteries of

Chiin Chou and Ju Chou, we read that there was a factory in
the Ju-ning Fu at the village of Ts'ai ^, which was intermittently

active in the first half of the fifteenth century.

From another passage we learn that in the valleys of Ching ^

^!l and the hills of Shu (or Szech'uan) there are black and yellow
clays suitable for pottery ; that the potters had their kilns in holes
in the mountains ; and that they used the yellow clay for the body
of the ware and overlaid it with the black, making jars, drug pots,
cauldrons, pots, dishes, bowls, sacrificial vessels, and the like. They

also made one kind of ware which resembled that of Chiin Chou.
Specimens of modern pottery in the Field Museum, Chicago,

include ornamental wares such as pomegranate-shaped water pots,
etc., covered with an oily green glaze recalling some of the Sung

1 See p. 219.

Tu' Shu, op. cit., section Tao kung pu hui k'ao, fol. 9.

8 Ching is the name of the old state of Ch'u, >vhich included Hunan and Hupeh, so

that the expression here used covers an enormous tract of Central China. See "Tu shu,

section Tao kung pu tsa lu, fol. 2.