Page 75 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

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The Pang Dynasty, 618-906 a.d.

But there are other cogent reasons which will appeal more

directly to the student of ceramics. Among the few specimens of

pottery in the Nara Collection,^ there are several bowls and a dish,
accorded in the official catalogue the meagre description " China
ware," which have a peculiar glaze of creamy yellow with large, green
mottling, and there is besides a drum-shaped vase, " green with

yellowish patches." This type of glaze is found on many of the

tomb wares, some of which have amber brown and violet blue
splashes in addition. From these data it is possible to identify
a series of T'ang glazes, including creamy white, straw yellow,
faint green, leaf green, amber and violet blue, all soft and more
or less transparent with minutely crackled texture and closely
analogous to the coloured lead glazes used on our own " Whieldon "

pottery of Staffordshire in the eighteenth centur^^ Three years
ago a Parisian dealer was offering for sale the contents of an important
tomb. For once in a way, the chief articles of the find had been
kept together ; at least so it was positively asserted, and there

was nothing improbable in the circumstance. They included two
splendidly modelled figures and a saddled horse in the typical T'ang
ware, with bold washes of green and brown glazes, and with them
was a stone slab engraved with an inscription. I was able to
examine a photograph and a rubbing of this stone, in which excel-
lent judges could find no sign of spurious work. The inscription
was long and difficult to translate, but the main facts were clear.
It commemorated a princely personage of the name of Wen, whose

style was Shou-ch'eng, a man of Lo-yang in Honan, who died at

Ho-j^ang Hsien on the 16th day of the first month of the second
year of Yung Shun, viz. 683 a.d.

Among the T'ang figurines the horse is conspicuous not only

in its comparative frequ-ency, but for the spirit and character with

which it is portrayed. The men of T'ang were clearl}'- great horse

lovers. Their pictorial artists excelled in painting the noble beast,

and the "Hundred Colts" by the celebrated painter Han Kan is a
classic of horse painting. Among the precious fragments of T'ang

pictures on silk which Sir Aurel Stein brought back from his first
expedition in the Taklamakan Desert there were several with
scenes in which horsemen figured. I have compared these with the
tomb figures and found them to tally with wonderful exactitude,

* See the Toyei Shuko (Illustrated Catalogue of the ancient Imperial Treasure

called Shoso-in, by Omura Scigai, Tokyo, 1910), Xos. 154, 155 and 156.

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