Industry

 

 
-POTTERY and PORCELAIN-
 

Section 3
Pottery of the Warring States Period

Contents


Introduction

Miniature vessels. Pottery painted in red and black. Excavated at Ch'ang p'ing. Late Warring States period.

By comparison with the bronzes, the pottery of Western and early Eastern Zhou is sober stuff. Many of the finest pieces are crude imitations of bronze vessels, though generally only the shape is copied, such bronze like decoration as there is being confined to bulls' heads or t'ao-t'ieh masks attached to the sides. Although a few specimens of plain red ware have been found, most Western Zhou pottery consists of a coarse gray ware, the most popular purely ceramic shape being a round-bottomed, wide-mouthed storage jar which is often cord-marked. But recent discoveries show that in addition to this mass of unglazed wares a much more sophisticated ceramic art was beginning to develop. The Chinese language only distinguishes two types of ware: t'ao (pottery) and tz'u (which includes both stoneware and porcelain). Some of the Western Zhou wares are certainly tz'u, if not what we would call porcelain, a particularly fine example being the glazed jar illustrated here, which was unearthed in 1972 from an early Western Zhou burial at Pei-yao-ts'un in Honan. The important tomb of the reign of Mu Wang at P'u-tuts'un near Sian contained rather similar vessels decorated with horizontal grooves and covered with a thin bluish-green felspathic glaze quite different from the blackish or yellowish Shang glazes. Other glazed wares, dateable by bronze inscriptions to the 11th and 10th centuries BCE, have been found in graves in Honan, Kiangsu, and Anhui. They may all be considered as ancestors of the great family of celadons of later dynasties.

Some, representing the creatures of the steppes singly or in mortal combat, are almost purely "Ordos." Yet others are in a mixed style: a garment hook recently excavated at Hui-hsien, for example, is decorated with three pen annular jade rings in a setting formed of two intertwined dragons in silver overlaid with gold. The dragons are Chinese, but the sweeping angular planes in which they are modeled come from the northern steppes. No such barbarian influences appear in the pottery of North China at this time: the nomads, indeed, had little use for pottery and no facilities for making it. The gray tradition continues, but the coarse cord-marked wares of the early Zhou are left behind. Shapes become more elegant, often imitating bronze-the most popular forms being the tsun, the three-legged ting, the tall covered tou ("stem-cup") and an egg-shaped, covered tui on three feet. Generally they are heavy and plain, but some of those found at Chin-ts'un bear animals and hunting scenes stamped or incised with great verve in the wet clay before firing. Sometimes the potter even attempted to imitate the original metal by giving his vessel a lustrous black surface or, more rarely, clothed it in tinfoil. During the early 1940s, a group of miniature pottery vessels and figurines, said to have come from late Zhou tombs in the Huihsien region, began to appear on the Peking antique market. Very heavily potted and beautifully finished, the vessels included miniature hu, covered ting and p'an, and a garment hook and mirror, on the burnished black surface of which the inlaid geometric decoration of the Chin-ts'un bronzes was imitated in red pigment. These are indications that many, if not all, of these pieces are modern forgeries, possibly inspired by the similar, though artistically inferior, pottery figurines discovered in a tomb at Ch'ang-chih in south Shansi, and by miniature pottery vessels unearthed in 1959 in a Warring States tomb at Ch'ang-p'ing near Peking, three of which are illustrated on this page.


Sources

 

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Copyright DateRichard R. Wertz