Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 1.djvu/25

 point les porcelaines bleues étaient estimées, il suffit de rappeler qu'on les appelait Kuan-ki, vases des magistrats." Now, the fact is that decoration in blue under the glaze retained all the characteristics of a most rudimentary manufacture throughout the Sung dynasty; that the colour erroneously translated "blue" by Julien, referred to the glaze itself, not to the decoration, and that the Kuan-ki never included ware having blue designs sous couverte. The whole import of these misconceptions will be presently appreciated by the reader. Their number, and the very false conclusions to which they led Julien, Jacquemart, and other less notable writers, have contributed to obscure a subject already sufficiently perplexing.

The annals of the Middle Kingdom attribute the infancy of the keramic art either to the reign of Huang-ti, or to that of Shun, semi-mythical sovereigns who are supposed to have flourished some twenty-five centuries before the Christian era. Of these very early wares tradition does not tell anything that can be taken seriously or that need be recorded here. They were doubtless rude, technically defective and inartistic types. At a later date it is stated that Wu Wang, founder of the Chou dynasty (12th century ), appointed a descendant of the Emperor Shun to be director of pottery, and in a record of the same dynasty the processes of fashioning on the wheel and moulding are described. The pieces produced appear to have been funeral urns, libation jars, altar dishes, cooking utensils, and so forth. The same annals add that these manufactures were earthen vessels, and that they were called pi-ki, or vases of pottery. More than nine hundred years later ( 202), there is talk of another species of ware called tao-ki which