Page 99 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

The Tang Dynasty, 618-906 a.d. 35

is whitish pottery, and the beautifully moulded surface is covered

with a brownish green glaze, which, like that of Fig. 1,

Plate 12, is clearly a survival of the Han glaze. Other instances

might be quoted of Graeco-Roman influences reflected in T'ang
wares. There are obvious traces of the " egg and tongue " and
" honeysuckle " patterns in border designs, and the shapes of
vases and ewers often betray a feeling which is more Greek
than Chinese.

Reverting to the engraved T'ang ornament, there is a little

oblong box in the Kunstgewerbe Museum at Berlin with incised

rosettes of prunus blossom form, glazed white and yellow in a green
ground and finished almost with the neatness of Ch'ien Lung porce-
lain, but of undoubtedly T'ang origin. The same prunus design
occurs on a typical T'ang bowl, in the Eumorfopoulos Collection,
stencilled white in a green ground. I have postponed reference to
these pieces because of the bearing of the latter on the decoration
of the wonderful figure illustrated in the frontispiece, which will

make a fitting climax to our series of T'ang specimens.

This figure, with its stand, measures 50 inches in height, and
represents one of sixteen Lohan or Arhats, the Buddhist apostles.

Its provenance has been kept discreetly concealed,^ but we may

^ Since writing the above note my attention has been drawn to a delightful article

in the Neue Rundschau (Oct., 1913, p. 1427) by F. Perzynski, entitled Jagd auf Gotter.
Mr. Perzynski describes his hazardous journey to an almost inaccessible cave temple
on a mountain top near Ichou in Chih-li, and there is little doubt that this is the place

from which our wonderful figure came. He speaks of the hill as the Acthlohanberg,

implying a tradition of eight of these figures of Lohan, which had apparently been
concealed in this and other caverns for safety during a period of iconoclasm, such as
occurred in the ninth and the thirteenth centuries, when thousands of Buddhist shrines

were wrecked. He found the shrine bare of the Lohan, except for a few fragments.

The rest had been pillaged, and several of the figures had evidently been broken in
the attempt to remove them through the narrow aperture of the caves, or to conceal
them afterwards. Parts of them, and a sadly damaged Lohan, were actually shown
to him in the neighbourhood ; and he afterwards succeeded in obtaining a complete
figure and a torso, which were exhibited by him in Berlin. On the altar of the shrine
he found an incense burner of glazed ware, which he attributed to the Yiian dynasty,
and there was a tablet recording the restoration of the altar in the reign of Cheng T6
(early sixteenth century). It is interesting to note that Mr. Perzynski assumed at once
that these figures are of T'ang date. Incidentalh', he mentions a visit to a hill which
he calls the Kuan>inberg, where a cavern temple exists containing the remains of a
colossal statue of Kuanyin. It is now broken, but Mr. Perzynski saw it standing in its
enormous stature of three metres high, to which must be added a stand a metre high
and two in width. This figure was originally in glazed pottery, possibly also of the
T'ang period, but a great part of it had been restored in wood and plaster in the seven-

teenth century.