Industry

 

 
-POTTERY and PORCELAIN-
 

Section 2
Shang Pottery

Contents


Introduction

Urn. Carved white pottery. From Anyang. Late Shang Dynasty.
Ceramics formed the backbone of early Chinese art.

The metalworkers of the time, borrowed a great deal from the decoration, form and function of these works, but leant far less. The Shang period is marked with the crudest gray earthenware, cord-marked, incised or decorated with repeated stamped motifs ranging from squares and coils- the ancestor of the thunder pattern (lei-wen)- to simple versions of the zoomorphic masks that appear on the bronzes.

Pottery decorated by stamping or carving geometric designs in the wet clay has been found in a number of Neolithic sites in the southeast, notably in Fukien (Kuang-tse) and Kwangsi (Ch'ing-chiang). In South China, this technique persisted into the Han Dynasty and was carried to Southeast Asia.

It is very seldom found in the Neolithic pottery of North China, and its appearance on vessels at Chengchow and Anyang suggests that by the Shang Dynasty the culture of the southern peoples was already beginning to make its influence felt.

The beautiful white Shang pottery is unique in the history of Chinese ceramics. So fine is it that it has been taken for porcelain, but it is in fact a very brittle ware made from almost pure kaolin, finished on the wheel, and fired at about 1000°C.

Tsun vase. Stoneware decorated with impressed design under yellowish brown ash glaze. Excavated at Chengchow, Honan. Middle Shang period.

It has been suggested that many styles and decorations have their origins in bronze, due to remarkable resemblances. No proof exists to support this theory, though it wouldn't be uncommon, given the evolution of other pottery/ bronze cultures in other parts of the world.

Southeastern China had already evolved a technique for stamping designs in the wet clay, which in turn influenced bronze design; the white stoneware urn in the Freer Gallery, seen at right, is indeed very close in design and decoration to a bronze vessel in the Hellstrom collection.

The Chengchow finds suggest that some of the motifs decorating both the white ware and the bronzes originated in the earlier stamped gray pottery; the techniques and designs used in woodcarving suggest another possible source.

Some of the gray and buff ware found in Shang sites in Honan and Hupeh is glazed. While in some cases the glaze was produced accidentally when wood ash fell on the heated pottery in the kiln, in others it was a deliberately applied ash glaze.

These Shang glazed wares, which are now being found over a wide area of northern, central and eastern China, mark the beginning of a tradition that culminates, two thousand years later, in the Yüeh wares and celadons of Chekiang and Kiangsu.


Sources

 

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Copyright DateRichard R. Wertz