Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 1.djvu/171

 wood. In Japan or Europe, where the art of repairing porcelain is understood, a very much larger number of these beautiful objects would have been preserved in a presentable condition. But the Chinese, curiously enough, never made the smallest progress in work which a people so appreciative of porcelain and technically so expert might have been expected to carry to a high degree of development. A Chinaman saw only two methods of dealing with fractured porcelain: either he cut down the piece until the injured section had disappeared, and there remained a truncated vase or a segment of a pot; or he bored a row of holes on either side of the fracture, and into them hammered little clamps of iron or copper. It was a frank kind of proceeding, but nothing clumsier or more disfiguring can well be conceived. The result of it all is that very few of the larger and finer types of "Hawthorns" have survived entire, and owing to the great and just esteem in which such pieces are held by European and American collectors, as well as to their comparative neglect by Chinese virtuosi, the majority of those procurable have already gravitated westward, and the Chinese market is virtually empty. Much of this applies to the ginger-pots also. They are smaller than the usual type of sugar-jar, being generally only ten or eleven inches in height; their contour is simpler and their lids are flat. As to colour, they stand neither higher nor lower than the sugar-jars, but they differ from the latter in the much more frequent tessellation of their surface, and in the more constant occurrence of the "petal-cluster" style of decoration as distinguished from the "spray." The trumpet-necked vases are the least attractive of all,