-POTTERY and PORCELAIN- |
Section
5
Three Kingdoms- Tang Dynasty Ceramics
Contents
Horse. Painted pottery. Said to be from a tomb near Luoyang. Northern Wei Dynasty.
The hunt among mountains. Relief on the shoulder of a pottery hu. Line drawing after Palmgren. Han Dynasty.
The ceramics industry in North China fell into decline after the Period of Disunion, and only recovered gradually. The quality and variety of the ming-ch'i deteriorated. Much rarer now are the farms and pigsties that give so delightful a picture of Han rural economy. But to compensate, the best of the grave figurines have an almost fairylike elegance that reminds us of the ladies in the Ku K'ai-chih scrolls, while the horses are no longer the tough, stocky, deep- chested creatures of Han art; they seem, rather, in their heraldic grace of form and the richness of their trappings to evoke a bygone age of chivalry. The Wei figurines are usually dark-bodied and unglazed, but some are painted with colors that have mellowed to soft reds and blues through long burial.
It was not until the sixth century that really fine-quality wares were being made in the north. Some vessels show the same variety and robustness of style that we find in the Buddhist sculpture of the period, borrowing motifs such as the lotus from the repertoire of Buddhist art, and pearl roundels and lion masks in appliqué from Sasanian metalwork. It was a restless and uncertain age in Chinese art, although here and there an untroubled mastery was achieved, as in the beautiful porcelain vase from the tomb of a Northern Ch'i offcial buried at Anyang in 575. It is covered with an ivory white, crackled glaze splashed with green-a technique hitherto thought to have been unknown in China before the T'ang Dynasty. This tomb also contained pottery flasks with Sasanian figure subjects in relief under a brown glaze. A similar mixture of Chinese and western Asiatic motifs and techniques can be seen in other crafts in China at this time, notably metalwork and relief sculpture, showing that the cosmopolitanism that we think of as typical of the first half of the T'ang Dynasty was already well established in the sixth century.
The hunt among mountains. Relief on the shoulder of a pottery hu. Line drawing after Palmgren. Han Dynasty.
So far, very few Six Dynasties kiln sites have been discovered in the north. The position in the lower Yangtse Valley is quite different. Kilns have been located in ten counties in Chekiang alone, while many of their products have been unearthed from dated tombs of the third and fourth centuries in the Nanking region. Ofthese pottery centers, the most important were those in Shangyu- hsien and around the shores of Shang-lin-hu in Yu-yao-hsien, active into the T'ang and Five dynasties. In addition to celadon, the kilns at Te-ch'ing, north of Hangchow, also produced a ware with a rich black glaze. But in general the early Chekiang celadons show, in the growing strength and purity of their shapes, the final emancipation of the Chinese potter from his earlier bondage to the aesthetic of the metalworker.
Horse. Painted pottery. Said to be from a tomb near Luoyang. Northern Wei Dynasty.
Indeed, freedom in the arts seems to be the keynote of this period, not only in technique and design but also in the attitude of the privileged classes toward the arts. For this was the age of the first critics and aestheticians, the age of the first gentlemen painters and calligraphers, the age of the first great private art collections and of the birth of such cultivated pursuits as garden designing and conversation as a fine art. Just as the sixth-century anthologist Hsiao T'ung selected the poems for his Wen-hsiian on grounds of literary merit alone, so, it seems, did patrons in the Six Dynasties come for the first time to value their possessions whether paintings or calligraphy, bronzes, jade, or pottery-simply because they were beautiful.
The hunt among mountains. Relief on the shoulder of a pottery hu. Line drawing after Palmgren. Han Dynasty.
T'ang ceramics, too, made much use of foreign shapes and motifs. The metal ewer was copied in stoneware, often with appliqué designs in relief under a mottled green and brown glaze; the rhyton was reproduced from an old Persian shape; the circular pilgrim bottle, which appears in the blue-glazed pottery of Parthian Persia and Syria, reappears in China, decorated rather roughly in relief with vintage boys, dancers, musicians, and hunting scenes. The Hellenistic amphora in Chinese stoneware loses its static symmetry; the playful dragon handles, the lift and buoyancy of its silhouette, the almost casual way in which the glaze is splashed on, all bespeak the touch of the Chinese craftsman, who brings the clay to life under his hands.
Horse. Painted pottery. Said to be from a tomb near Luoyang. Northern Wei Dynasty.
The T'ang Dynasty is notable in the history of Chinese ceramics for the dynamic beauty of its shapes, for the development of colored glazes, and for the perfecting of porcelain. Now, no longer are potters limited to the simple green- and brown-tinted glazes of the Han. A white ware with blue-green splashes was already being made in North China under the Northern Ch'i Dynasty (550- 577). The fine white earthenware of the T'ang Dynasty is often clothed in a polychrome glaze, made by mixing copper, iron, or cobalt with a colorless lead silicate to produce a rich range of colors, from blue and green to yellow and brown; this glaze is applied more thinly than before, often over a white slip, is generally very finely crackled, and stops short of the base in an uneven line. Dishes are stamped with foliate or lotus patterns and decorated with colored glazes, which are confined by the incised lines of the central design, whereas elsewhere the colors tend to run together. The T'ang love of rich effects is seen also in the marbled wares, made by mixing a white and a brown clay together and covering the vessel with a transparent glaze. The more robust T'ang wares were exported to the Near East, where they were imitated in the poor-quality clays of Persia and Mesopotamia.
Horse. Painted pottery. Said to be from a tomb near Luoyang. Northern Wei Dynasty.
There were two main centers for the production of these colored wares in North China. The Sian region made vessels and figurines with a light buff earthenware body, while kilns in Honan, using clay with a much higher kaolin content, made wares with a fine white body akin to porcelain-although a good deal softer. After the An Lu-shan rebellion of 755 the production of these colored wares declined in Shensi and Honan, but it continued in Szechwan, in the newly prosperous city of Yangchow where the Grand Canal meets the Yangtze River, and in the far north under the Liao Dynasty.
The hunt among mountains. Relief on the shoulder of a pottery hu. Line drawing after Palmgren. Han Dynasty.
In the meantime, however, as the north declined the southeast grew in prosperity. Before the end of the dynasty, Yüeh ware had reached a high pitch of perfection at the Shang-lin-hu kilns near Hangchow. The body is porcelain; bowls and vases (the most common shapes) are sometimes decorated with molded or incised flowers and plants under an olive-green glaze. The soft-bodied North China wares have a flat or slightly concave base, but the Yüeh wares have a fairly high, and often slightly splayed, foot.
Horse. Painted pottery. Said to be from a tomb near Luoyang. Northern Wei Dynasty.
It was probably in the Sui Dynasty that the Chinese potters perfected true porcelain, by which is meant a hard, translucent ware fused at high temperature with the aid of a high proportion of felspar, causing it to ring when struck. In 851 a work entitled The Story of China and India by an unknown author appeared at Basra; it contained information about the Cantonese supplied by a merchant named Sulaiman, who writes of them: "They have pottery of excellent quality, of which bowls are made as fine as glass drinking cups; the sparkle of water can be seen through it, although it is pottery." Indeed, this white ware was already in demand far beyond China's shores, for fragments of both green Yüeh ware and white porcelain were found in the ruins of the Abbasid city of Samarra, which was the summer residence of the caliphs from 836 to 883. Although the site was occupied after that date, the greater part of the huge quantity of shards belongs to the years of its heyday and bears witness to a flourishing export trade in Chinese ceramics.
The hunt among mountains. Relief on the shoulder of a pottery hu. Line drawing after Palmgren. Han Dynasty.
What was this mysterious white ware? An almost pure white porcelain was being produced in Kung-hsien, Honan, very early in the 7th century, but there was another T'ang ware that was whiter and finer still. An Essay on Tea (the Ch'a-ching), written, it is believed, by the poet Lu Yü in the latter half of the eighth century, says that for drinking tea one should use Yüeh bowls, which gave it the coloring of ice or jade, or the ware of Hsing-chou, which was as white as snow or silver. In spite of intensive searches in recent years in the Hsing-chou area, now called Nei-ch'iu hsien, no kilns producing a pure white ware were found there. But in 1980 and 1981, investigators discovered in four kilns in Lin-ch'eng-hsien, a little to the north, remains of porcelain that exactly fits Lu Yu's description of "Hsing ware." These scholars point out that early writers-and Lu Yü was, after all, a poet were not always precise in designating the source of ceramic wares, citing the example of T'ang Ting ware, which was actually made not in Ting-hsien but in neighboring Ch'ü-yang-hsien.
Horse. Painted pottery. Said to be from a tomb near Luoyang. Northern Wei Dynasty.
The white porcelain soon became popular and was widely imitated, notably in the white-slipped stone wares of Hunan and Szechwan. At the same time, the number of kilns making the finer wares began to multiply. In the latter half of the dynasty, white porcelain wares were made- if a single reference in a poem of Tu Fu is acceptable evidence- at Ta-yi in Szechwan; while pale bluish-white ware, the predecessor of the lovely Sung h'ing-pai (ying-ch'ing), was already being produced in the Shih-hu-wan kilns near Ching-te-chen, and at Chi-chou, both in Kiangsi. Yüeh-type celadons were being manufactured near Changsha in Hunan, and in Hsiang-yin-hsien north of the city, where some of the earliest experiments in under glaze and enamel painting in China were undertaken. A hard gray stoneware, ancestor of the famous splashed Chiin wares of the Sung Dynasty, was made in kilns at Huang-tao in Chia-hsien, not far from Chün-chou. The full, massive shapes covered with a rich brown or black felspathic glaze are often made even more striking by bluish-white phosphatic splashes.
The hunt among mountains. Relief on the shoulder of a pottery hu. Line drawing after Palmgren. Han Dynasty.
The fact that most of the T'ang wares we enjoy today were made, not for the collector's pleasure, not even for domestic use, but simply as cheap grave goods probably accounts for their unsophisticated charm and vigor. These qualities are most apparent in the great numbers of figurines placed in the tombs, which give a vivid picture of daily life in T'ang times. They vary in size from animals and toys a few inches high to gigantic horses, Bactrian camels, armed men, and fantastic squatting guardian creatures popularly called ch'i-t'ou or pi-shieh. They include a fascinating array of officials, servants, dancing girls, and musicians; indeed, among them women predominate. Women rode horseback with the men and even played polo. A passage in the "Treatise on Carriages and Dress" in the Chiu T'ang-shu (Old T'ang History) records that "at the beginning of the K'ai-yuan period (713- 742) the palace ladies who rode behind the carriages all wore central Asian hats, exposing the face, without a veil. Suddenly, their hair also was exposed when they broke into a gallop. Some were wearing men's dress and boots."
Something of the gaiety of this courtly life is recaptured in these pottery figurines. The fairylike slenderness of the Six Dynasties women gives way in the fashion of the eighth century to an almost Victorian rotundity- Yang Kuei-fei herself was said to have been plump. But these women make up in character what they lack in elegance, while Chinese potters derived much amusement from caricaturing the extraordinary clothes, the beards and great jutting noses of the foreigners from central and western Asia. The human figurines were almost always made in moulds, the front and back being cast separately, while the larger figures and animals were made in several pieces, generally with the base, or underside of the belly, left open. Though sometimes left in the slip and painted, they were most often lavishly decorated with three-color glazes, which in time acquired a minute crackle very difficult for the forger to imitate.
The most spectacular of the T'ang figurines are the fierce armed men who are often represented standing on demons. They may represent actual historical figures. Once, when the emperor T'ai tsung was ill, ghosts started screeching outside his room and throwing bricks and tiles about. A general Chin Shu-pao, who claimed that he had "chopped up men like melons, and piled up corpses like ant-hills," offered, with a fellow officer, to stand guard outside the imperial sickroom, with the result that the screeching and brick-throwing abruptly ceased. The emperor was so pleased that he had the generals' portraits painted to hang on either side of his palace gate. "This tradition," the T'ang book tells us, "was carried down to later years, and so these men became door- gods."
Section 4 | Pottery & Porcelain | Section 6