Page 362 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

2o6 Chinese Pottery and Porcelain

many of them have been brought from the Imperial buildings at
Peking which are known to have been mostly erected in the K'ang
Hsi and Ch'ien Lung period. On the other hand, nothing is more

difficult to date than this type of glazed pottery, in which the ware,
the colours, and the decorative traditions seem to have continued
almost unchanged from the early Ming times to the present day.

The tiles from the Nanking pagoda and from the eighteenth-

century buildings at Peking are practically interchangeable.

Nor must we forget that the potters who made the architectural

pottery often turned their hands and materials to the manufacture
of vases and figures and other ceramic ornaments for domestic use,

and even imposing altar sets for the temples. An important example

of this work is seen in Fig. 2 of Plate 55, a large incense vase ^ of
traditional form (from an altar set) with bowl-shaped body, wide
mouth, two upstanding handles, and three feet with lion masks. It
is ornamented with a peony scroll and two dragons in high relief,

and is made of pottery with a dull turquoise green glaze. An in-

scription on the handles proclaims the fact that it was " dedi-

cated by the chieftain Kuo Hsin-she ; made in the eighth year of Chia

Ching," i.e. 1529. In more recent times the tile works near Peking
have turned their attention to the manufacture of vases and bowls
with rich soft monochrome glazes, yellow, green, turquoise and
aubergine in the manner of the similarly coloured porcelains which
are highly prized, and, as Bushell tells us, "the soft excipient (i.e.
the pottery body) seems to impart an added softness " to the glazes.
" The fact that yellow clay," he continues, " used often to be
mixed with the porcelain earth in the old fabrics to enhance the

brilliancy of the glaze colours, gives a certain vraisemblance to the

fraudulent reproductions which I have seen sold for as many dollars

as they would cost in cents to produce." It is unlikely that the

issue of these by-products of the tile factories is confined to the

neighbourhood of Peking. Among the miscellaneous potteries I

should add that Ka-shan,^ in Chekiang, is reputed to have been
noted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for a fine porcel-

lanous stoneware with opaque, camellia-leaf green glaze minutely

crackled.

1 See Catalogue B.F. A., 1910, L. 1.
* See Dr. Voretzsch, Catalogue of Chinese Pottery.