Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 1.djvu/227

 PORCELAINIDECORATED

and such like elaborate decoration, carved in open- work (/ing-/ung), and painted in enamel colours, is not work of too complicated a kind. He quotes the ancient emperor Shun, whose vessels are said to have been unvarnished, and Y%, who refused to chisel his sacrificial bowls, and he appeals to his sovereign to imitate them. The result of this memorial was the lessening by one-half of the quantity of pricket can- dlesticks, chess-boards, screens, and paint-brush vases. Such wholesale production accounts for the abundance of porcelain of this date in Peking, where a street hawker may be seen with sweetmeats piled on dishes over a yard in dameter, or ladling iced syrup out of Ming bowls, and there is hardly a butcher’s shop without a large Ming jar, generally broken, it is true, on the counter for throwing in scraps of meat. This is the Ming Tz’u, the porcelain of the Ming dynasty ‘par excellence,” with good glaze and a brilliant style of colouring characteristic of the period, but of coarse paste and often clumsy form, the bottom of the vase or jar may be unglazed, and the mark of the reign inscribed outside near the rim.”

It may, indeed, be confidently asserted that from the Western collector’s point of view, the use of vitri- fiable enamels for decorating large pieces, such as flower-vases, fish-bowls, covered jars and so forth, came into vogue during the last century of the Ming dynasty (1550-1650). The wares of this period are virtually the only representatives of the dynasty that have found their way westward. Many of them went to Japan, where the slightly archaic character of their decoration gave them value in the eyes of the Tea Clubs. They were known as Ban-reki Aka-e, or “red picture ware of Ban-reki” (Chinese Wan-/), a

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