Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 1.djvu/32

 From all this it will be seen that little hope remains of arriving at an accurate decision as to the first manufacture of translucid porcelain in China. It seems fair to conclude, however, that although the keramic art was tolerably widely practised from the beginning of the Tang dynasty (618), it scarcely emerged from a mediocre condition until the tenth century; that for any purpose higher than the rôle of ordinary household utensils, vessels of glass, jade, or bronze were chiefly employed, and that porcelain did not make its appearance among the keramic productions of the Middle Kingdom until the beginning of the Sung dynasty (960 ). By and by, evidence will be adduced to show that Chinese experts, though thorough masters of the processes of porcelain manufacture, deliberately chose fine stone-ware or semi-porcelain, in preference to hard-paste porcelain, for some of their greatest tours de force.