Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 1.djvu/383

 mens were not manufactured in Kwang-tung but at Ching-tê-chên.

The faiences spoken of above are the only notable wares of their class in China. But when the student comes to consider pottery, he is confronted by an important ware, the Yi-hsing-yao, known to Western collectors as boccaro. Yi-hsing lies near the Western shore of the Tai-wu Lake, a few miles from Shanghai, up the Yang-tsze-kiang. It is still celebrated for its terra cotta pottery, immense quantities of which are used by the Chinese for tea-pots. (The modern productions, however, are coarse and clumsy as compared with those that commanded the admiration of tea-drinkers, especially in Japan, during the past three centuries. The pâte of the latter is as fine as pipe-clay and almost as hard as porcelain. Prized essentially for the colour and quality of the biscuit, it was not glazed, the keramist, depending for decorative effect upon quaint conceits of shape and delicately moulded ornaments incised or in relief. It would be nearly as difficult to detail all the colours of the Yi-hsing pâte as to catalogue the innumerable forms of tiny tea-pots to the manufacture of which the factories devoted their chief attention. In the Illustrated Catalogue of H’siang two specimens are depicted, but the painter, by an unskilful use of pigments, has suggested the false idea that the pieces are glazed. Hi’siang, as translated by Dr. Bushell, describes them thus:—

Tea-pot of Yi-hsing pottery of the Ming dynasty. Of plain form with hexagonal section. The pottery of Yi-hsing dates from the Ching-tê era (1506-1521) of our own dynasty, during which a celebrated potter named Kung-chun, a native of the district, fashioned vessels of earthenware to