Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 1.djvu/126

 period may probably be assigned the first manufacture of hard-paste translucid porcelain in China. It is impossible, of course, to speak with absolute certainty on such a point. Were there question of a new discovery, such as that made by John Schnorr at Ane, or by Madame Darnet at St. Yrieix, it might be easy to be more explicit. But the story deals, rather, with what seems to have been a gradual transition. The records of Ching-tê-chên show very plainly that, from the time when the potter's industry first began to flourish there (circ. 580 ), kaolin, or porcelain earth, was used at the factories. Indeed it was the presence of feldspathic rock that lent the locality its importance as a keramic centre. In order to manufacture fine porcelain, however, it was necessary to mix other clays with this petrosilex, and the nature of the ware produced would have varied, of course, with the proportions in which the ingredients were combined. So long as thick lustrous glazes constituted the chief decoration of a piece, a solid pâte was probably found to possess special advantage. But when colourless, translucid glaze came to be required, as in the case of blue-and-white ware, the quality of the body of a vase naturally underwent some change. The progress of the two processes—decoration with blue under the glaze and the manufacture of a true hard-paste porcelain biscuit—may therefore be said to have occurred simultaneously during the same epoch—the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—and to have attained appreciable development, though by no means yet reaching a point of culmination, at the close of the Yuan dynasty.

Among the keramic products of China, none, per-