Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 1.djvu/27

 "porcelain" was of an iron-red colour. Plainly the term "porcelain" cannot properly be applied to such wares, and it becomes evident that both in the original of the distinguished sinologue's translation and in the translation itself, the same looseness of phraseology occurs.

Turning now for information to the neighbouring empire of Japan, it appears that in the middle of the fifth century of the Christian era, a Japanese Emperor, Yuriaku, issued a sumptuary decree requiring that a class of ware called seiki should be substituted for the earthen utensils hitherto employed at the Court. Ancient Japanese commentators interpret this seiki as another expression for tao-ki, the so-called "porcelain" of China. Now it is known that, despite the importation of Chinese wares into Japan which had taken place either directly or through Korea from the earliest times, and despite the tolerably regular trade carried on by Chinese merchants with the neighbouring empire, not so much as one piece of ware to which the term "porcelain" could be accurately applied, reached Japan before the twelfth century. The seiki of Yuriaku's time cannot, therefore, have been anything better than glazed pottery, and the same is doubtless true of its synonym, the tao-ki, said to have been invented in China at the beginning of the Christian era. In addition to this negative evidence, there are the positive statements of Japanese antiquarians, who unhesitatingly ascribe the invention of porcelain proper to the keramists of the Sung dynasty (960-1279). It was then, they aver,—whatever value the assertion may have—that the ideograph tsu was first written in such a way as to indicate the presence of kaolin in the ware; and it