V. PORCELAIN

The ceramic art—The making of porcelain—Its early history—“Céladon”—Enamels—The skill of Hao Shih-chiu—“Cloisonné”—The age of K’ang-hsi—Of Ch’ien Lung

As we approach the most distinct art of China, in which her leadership of the world is least open to dispute, we find ourselves harassed by our tendency to class pottery as an industry. To us, accustomed to think of “china” in terms of the kitchen, a pottery is a place where “china” is made; it is a factory like any other, and its products do not arouse exalted associations. But to the Chinese, pottery was a major art; it pleased their practical and yet esthetic souls by combining beauty with use; it gave to their greatest national institution—the drinking of tea—utensils as lovely to the finger-tips as to the eye; and it adorned their homes with shapes so fair that even the poorest families might live in the presence of perfection. Pottery is the sculpture of the Chinese.

Pottery is, first, the industry that bakes clay into usable forms, second, the art that makes those forms beautiful, and third, the objects produced by that industry and that art. Porcelain is vitrified pottery; that is, it is clay so mixed with minerals that when exposed to fire it melts or fuses into a translucent, but not transparent, substance resembling glass.* The Chinese made porcelain out of two minerals chiefly: kaolin—a pure white clay formed from decomposed felspar of granite, and pe-tun-tse—a fusible white quartz that gave the product its translucency. These materials were ground into a powder, worked up into a paste with water, moulded by hand or on the wheel, and subjected to high temperatures that fused the composition into a vitreous form, brilliant and durable. Sometimes the potters, not content with this simple white porcelain, covered the “paste”—i.e., the vessel formed but not yet fired—with a “glaze” or coating of fine glass, and then placed the vessel in the kiln; sometimes they applied the glaze after baking the paste into a “biscuit,” and then placed the vessel over the fire again. Usually the glaze was colored; but in many cases the paste was painted in color before applying a transparent glaze, or colors were painted on the fired glaze and fused upon it by re-firing. These “over-glaze” colors, which we call enamels, were made of colored glass ground to powder and reduced to a liquid applicable with the painter’s slender brush. Life-trained specialists painted the flowers, others the animals, others the landscapes, others the saints or sages who meditated among the mountains or rode upon strange beasts over the waves of the sea.

Chinese pottery is as old as the Stone Age; Professor Andersson has found pottery, in Honan and Kansu, which “can hardly be later in time than 3000 B.C.”;¹⁰³ and the excellent form and finish of these vases assure us that even at this early date the industry had long since become an art. Some of the pieces resemble the pottery of Anau, and suggest a western origin for Chinese civilization. Far inferior to these neolithic products are the fragments of funerary pottery unearthed in Honan and ascribed to the declining years of the Shang Dynasty. No remains of artistic value appear again before the Han, when we find not only pottery, but the first known use of glass in the Far East.† Under the T’ang emperors the growing popularity of tea provided a creative stimulus for the ceramic art; genius or accident revealed, about the ninth century, the possibility of producing a vessel vitrified not only on the glazed surface (as under the Han arid in other civilizations before this age) but throughout—i.e., true porcelain. In that century a Moslem traveler, Suleiman, reported to his countrymen: “They have in China a very fine clay with which they make vases as transparent as glass; water is seen through them.” Excavations have recently discovered, on a ninth-century site at Samarra on the Tigris, pieces of porcelain of Chinese manufacture. The next recorded appearance of the substance outside of China was about 1171, when Saladin sent forty-one pieces of porcelain as a precious gift to the Sultan of Damascus.¹⁰⁵ The manufacture of porcelain is not known to have begun in Europe before 1470; it is mentioned then as an art which the Venetians had learned from the Arabs in the course of the Crusades.¹⁰⁶

Sung was the classic period of Chinese porcelain. Ceramists ascribe to it both the oldest extant wares and the best; even the Ming potters of a later age, who sometimes equaled them, spoke of Sung pottery in reverential terms, and collectors treasured its masterpieces as beyond any price. The great factories at Ching-te-chen, founded in the sixth century near rich deposits of the minerals used for making and coloring earthenware, were officially recognized by the imperial court, and began to pour out upon China an unprecedented stream of porcelain plates, cups, bowls, vases, beakers, jars, bottles, ewers, boxes, chess-boards, candlesticks, maps, even enameled and gold-inlaid porcelain hat-racks.¹⁰⁷ Now for the first time appeared those jade-green pieces known ascéladon,* which it has long been the highest ambition of the modern potter to produce, and of the collector to acquire.† Specimens of it were sent to Lorenzo de’ Medici by the Sultan of Egypt in 1487. The Persians and the Turks valued it not only for its incredibly smooth texture and rich lustre, but as a detector of poisons; the vessels would change color, they believed, whenever poisonous substances were placed in them.¹⁰⁹ Pieces of céladon are handed down from generation to generation as priceless heirlooms in the families of connoisseurs.¹¹⁰

For almost three hundred years the workers of the Ming Dynasty labored to keep the art of porcelain on the high level to which the Sung potters had raised it, and they did not fall far short of success. Five hundred kilns burned at Ching-te-chen, and the imperial court alone used 96,000 pieces of chinaware to adorn its gardens, its tables and its rooms.¹¹¹ Now appeared the first good enamels—colors fired over the glaze. Yellow monochromes and “egg-shell” blue and white porcelains reached perfection; the blue and white silver-mounted cup named from the Emperor Wan-li (or Shen Tsung) is one of the world’s masterpieces of the potter’s art. Among the experts of the Wan-li age was Hao Shih-chiu, who could make wine-cups weighing less than one forty-eighth of an ounce. One day, says a Chinese historian, Hao called at the home of a high official and begged permission to examine a porcelain tripod owned by the statesman, and numbered among the choicest of Sung wares. Hao felt the tripod carefully with his hands, and secretly copied the form of its design on a paper concealed in his sleeve. Six months later he visited the official again, and said: “Your Excellency is the possessor of a tripod censer of white Ting-yao.* Here is a similar one of mine.” Tang, the official, compared the new tripod with his own, and could detect no difference; even the stand and cover of the tripod fitted Hao’s completely. Hao smilingly admitted that his own piece was an imitation, and then sold it for sixty pieces of silver to Tang, who sold it for fifteen hundred.¹¹²

It was under the Mings that Chinese cloisonné attained its highest excellence. Both the word and the art came from outside: the word from the French cloison (partition), the art from the Near East of Byzantine days; the Chinese referred to its products occasionally as Kuei kuo yao—wares of the devils’ country.¹¹³ The art consists in cutting narrow strips of copper, silver or gold, soldering them edgewise upon the lines of a design previously drawn upon a metal object, filling the spaces between the cloisons (or wire lines) with appropriately colored enamel, exposing the vessel repeatedly to fire, grinding the hardened surface with pumice stone, polishing it with charcoal, and gilding the visible edges of the cloisons. The earliest known Chinese examples are some mirrors imported into Nara, Japan, about the middle of the eighth century. The oldest wares definitely marked belong to the end of the Mongol or Yüan Dynasty; the best, to the reign of the Ming Emperor Ching Ti. The last great period of Chinese cloisonné was under the great Manchu emperors of the eighteenth century.

The factories at Ching-te-chen were destroyed in the wars that ended the Ming Dynasty, and were not revived again until the accession of one of China’s most enlightened rulers, K’ang-hsi, who, quite as much as his contemporary Louis XIV, was every inch a king. The factories at Ching-te-chen were rebuilt under his direction, and soon three thousand furnaces were in operation. Never had China, or any other country, seen such an abundance of elegant pottery. The Kang-hsi workers thought their wares inferior to those of Ming, but modern connoisseurs do not agree with them. Old forms were imitated perfectly, and new forms were developed in rich diversity. By coating a paste with a glaze of a different tempo of fusibility the Manchu potters produced the prickly surface of “crackle” ware; and by blowing bubbles of paint upon the glaze they turned outsoufflé wares covered with little circles of color. They mastered the art of monochrome, and issued peach-bloom, coral, ruby, vermilion, sang-de-bœuf and Rose-du-Barry reds; cucumber, apple, peacock, grass and céladon greens; “Mazarin,” azure, lilac and turquoise (or “kingfisher”) blues; and yellows and whites of such velvet texture that one could only describe them as smoothness made visible. They created ornate styles distinguished by French collectors as Famille Rose, Famille Verte, Famille Noir and Famille Jaune—rose, green, black and yellow families.* In the field of polychromes they developed the difficult art of subjecting a vessel, in the kiln, to alternate draughts of clear and soot-laden air—the first providing, the second withdrawing, oxygen—in such ways that the green glaze was transformed into a flame of many colors, so that the French have called this variety flambé. They painted upon some of their wares high officials in flowing queue and robes, and created the “Mandarin” style. They painted flowers of the plum in white upon a blue (less often a black) background, and gave to the world the grace and delicacy of the hawthorn vase.

The last great age of Chinese porcelain came in the long and prosperous reign of Ch’ien Lung. Fertility was undiminished; and though the new forms had something less than the success of the K’ang-hsi innovations, the skill of the master-potters was still supreme. The Famille Roseattained its fullest perfection, and spread half the flowers and fruits of nature over the most brilliant glaze, while egg-shell porcelain provided costly lampshades for extravagant millionaires.¹¹⁴ Then, through fifteen bloody years (1850-64), came the T’ai-p’ing Rebellion, ruining fifteen provinces, destroying six hundred cities, killing twenty million men and women, and so impoverishing the Manchu Dynasty that it withdrew its support from the potteries, and allowed them to close their doors and scatter their craftsmen into a disordered world.

The art of porcelain, in China, has not recovered from that devastation, and perhaps it never will. For other factors have reinforced the destructiveness of war and the ending of imperial patronage. The growth of the export trade tempted the artists to design such pieces as best satisfied the taste of European buyers, and as that taste was not as fine as the Chinese, the bad pieces drove the good pieces out of circulation by a ceramic variation of Gresham’s law. About the year 1840 English factories began to make inferior porcelain at Canton, exported it to Europe, and gave it the name of “chinaware”; factories at Sèvres in France, Meissen in Germany, and Burslem in England imitated the work of the Chinese, lowered the cost of production by installing machinery, and captured yearly more and more of China’s foreign ceramic trade.

What survives is the memory of an art perhaps as completely lost as that of medieval stained glass; try as they will, the potters of Europe have been unable to equal the subtler forms of Chinese porcelain. Connoisseurs raise with every decade their monetary estimate of the masterpieces that survive; they ask five hundred dollars for a tea-cup, and receive $23,600 for a hawthorn vase; as far back as 1767 two “turquoise” porcelain “Dogs of Fo,” at auction, brought five times as much as Guido Reni’s “Infant Jesus,” and thrice as much as Raphael’s “Holy Family.”¹¹⁵ But any one who has felt, with eyes and fingers and every nerve, the loveliness of Chinese porcelain will resent these valuations, and count them as sacrilege; the world of beauty and the world of money never touch, even when beautiful things are sold. It is enough to say that Chinese porcelain is the summit and symbol of Chinese civilization, one of the noblest things that men have done to make their species forgivable on the earth.