Page 45 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

The Primitive Periods 3

The art of the Chou dynasty, as expressed in bronze and jade,

is fairly well known from illustrated Chinese and Western works.

It reflects a priestly culture in its hieratic forms and symbolical

ornament. It is majestic and stern, severely disdainful of senti-

ment and sensuous appeal. Of the pottery we know little, but

that little shows us a purely utilitarian ware of simple form, un-

glazed and almost devoid of ornament.

On Plate 1 are two types which may perhaps be regarded as

Afavourable examples of Chou pottery. tripod vessel, almost exactly

similar to Fig. 1, was published by Berthold Laufer,^ who shows

by analogy with bronzes of the period good reasons for its Chou

attribution, which he states is confirmed by Chinese antiquarians.
His example was of hard " gray clay, which on the surface has

assumed a black colour," and it had the surface ornamented with

a hatched pattern similar to that of our illustration. It has been

assumed that this hatched pattern is a sure sign of Chou origin,

and I have no doubt that it was a common decoration at the time.

But its use continued after the Chou period, and it is found on

pottery from a Han tomb in Szechuan, which is now in the British
Museum. It is, in fact, practically the same as the "mat marking"

on the Japanese and Corean pottery taken from the dolmens which

were built over a long period extending from the second century

B.C. to the eighth century a.d.

The taste of the time is reflected in a sentence which occurs in
the Kuan-tzu, a work of the fifth century B.C. : " Ornamentation

detracts from the merit of pottery." ^ The words used for orna-

"^^mentation are iven ts'ai (lit. pattern, bright colours), and they

seem to imply a knowledge of some means of colouring the ware. As

there is no evidence of the use of glaze before the Han period,

and enamelling in the ordinary ceramic sense is out of the question,

we may perhaps assume that some of the pottery of the Chou

period was painted with unfired pigments, a method certainly in

use in the Han dynasty. There is a vase in the British Museum

of unglazed ware with painted designs in black, red and white

pigments, which has been regarded as of Han period, but may

possibly be earlier (Plate 2, Fig. 3).

In addition to the Chou tripod, Laufer^ illustrates five specimens

1 Chinese Pottery of the Han Dynasty, Leyden, 1909, pp. 10-14.
' Quoted in the Ching-le Chen Tao lu, bk. ix.. fol. 1.

^ Loc. cit.