Page 361 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

Miscellaneous Potteries 205

porcelain bricks and coloured pottery tiles and mouldings from
the Nanking pagoda ; and tiles from the Ming tombs near Nanking,
which were built in 1400 a.d., and like the pagoda destroyed in the
T'aip'ing rebellion in 1853. The Nanking tiles and mouldings are
of hard buff pottery with translucent glazes of green and yellow
colour, minutely crackled, additional colours being formed with
red and creamy white slips. The tile-ends are ornamented with
dragon medallions.

Other architectural pottery in the same collection came from
the Imperial pleasure grounds at Peking, which were wrecked in
1860. These include tiles and antefixal ornaments from the pavilions

and temples in the Yiian Ming Yiian and from the Summer Palace,
and a few blue-glazed tiles from the Temple of Heaven. Numerous

tiles with relief figures and pottery figures from niches were picked
up in the ruins of the temples and pavilions in the Imperial grounds

after their capture in 1860; and many of the mouldings were found

to display strong European influences, due, no doubt, to the designs

of the Jesuits Attiret and Castiglione, who assisted the Emperor
Ch'ien Lung in erecting some of the buildings. Some of these
are in the British Museum besides antefixes in the form of yellow

dragon heads from the Winter Palace at Peking and from the cele-
brated Temple of Kin-shan, or Golden Island, in the Yangtze

;

and a tile from the Huang-ssu, the Great Lama temple, built by

K'ang Hsi in 1647. The tile in question is evidently part of a

restoration, for it bears the date corresponding to 1770.

The ordinary tiles and mouldings are not likely to be extensively

collected by private individuals, but many of the ridge tiles, with

figures of deities, horsemen, lions, ch'i-lin, and phoenixes, have

found their way into collections to which their spirited modelling

has served as a passport. The glazes on these are often richly
coloured, and include yellow, green, violet purple, aubergine and
purplish black, and occasionally high-fired glazes with flambe or

variegated colours. By accident or design, the figures are not

infrequently detached from their tiles and mounted on wooden
stands. The pottery figures from niches in the walls of temples
and public buildings are often finely modelled and richly glazed,
and, needless to say, they find a welcome in Western collections

(Plate 58).

It is a common but illogical practice to assign all these figures

in architectural pottery to the Ming dynasty ; illogical, because so