Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 1.djvu/304

 CHINA

themselves, though they, too, set no light value on good specimens. In Japan it was from the first a strong favourite. It seems to have come to that country originally from Korea, an accident that led the Japanese to attribute it to Korean factories and to call it ‘“‘ Haku-gérai” or “ Korean White.”’ The error still survives. Curiously enough, when Christi- anity began to take root in Japan, at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, statuettes of Kwan-yin (Japanese, Kuan-non) in Ivory- white porcelain were used as substitutes for images of the Virgin Mary. A remarkable collection of these statuettes, blackened by fumes of incense, is preserved in the Imperial Museum of Antiquities in the Ueno Park, Toky6, where it forms part of an assemblage of Christian relics. In some cases the goddess carries a baby in her arms; in others, she is accompanied by two or three children. ‘Thus associated with chil- dren she is known as Kwan-yin, the Maternal, and from the association bold inferences have been deduced by tracers of Buddhistic and Christian affinities. It need scarcely be observed that a demand in Japan for this form of Kwan-yim would soon have created a supply.

Solid, beautiful, and manufactured in the very province where stood Ch’tian-chou-fu, the principal mart of China’s foreign commerce, the Ivory-white — C/ien-yao naturally went abroad in considerable quan- tities. In the Dresden Collection there is preserved a little plate, said to be of this ware, with uncut jewels, rubies, and emeralds, let into the paste in gold filigree. The piece is marked below with the seal character fuh, in blue under the glaze. It is said to have been brought by a crusader from Palestine in the twelfth century. There are two difficulties about this

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