Page 73 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

CHAPTER III

^THE t'aXG DYNASTY, 618-906 A.D.

THE Chinese Empire, reunited by the Sui emperors, reached
the zenith of its power under the world-famed dynasty of the

AT'ang (618-906 a.d.). Chinese general penetrated into

Central India and took the capital, Magadha, in 648. Chinese junks

sailed into the Persian Gulf, and the northern boundaries of the

empire extended into Turkestan, where traces of a flourishing civil-

isation have been discovered in the sand-buried cities in the regions

of Turfan and Khotan, recently explored by Sir Aurel Stein and by
a German expedition under Professor Griinwedel. In return, we read

of Arab settlers in Yunnan and in Canton and the coast towns,

Aand the last of the Sassanids appealed to China for help. host of

foreign influences must have penetrated the Middle Kingdom at this

time, including those of the Indian, Persian, and Byzantine arts.

Proof of this, if proof were needed, is seen in the wonderful treasures

preserved in the Shoso-in at Nara in Japan, a temple museum

stocked in the eighth century chiefly with the personal belongings

of the Emperor Shomu, most of which had been sent over from

China. Indeed, the Nara treasure is, in many respects, the most

comprehensive exhibition of T'ang craftsmanship which exists

to-day.

The long period of prosperity enjoyed by China under the T'ang

is famed in history as the golden age of literature and art. The

Wuage which produced the poet Li Po, the painter Tao-tzu, and

the poet-painter Wang Wei, whose " poems were pictures and

his pictures poems," was indeed an age of giants. It is certain that

the potter's art shared in no small measure the progress of the

period, though at this distance of time we can hardly expect that
many monuments of this fragile art should have survived. Indeed,

it has been the custom of writers in the past to dismiss the T'ang

pottery in a few words, or to disregard it entirely as an unknown

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