Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 1.djvu/86

 ory that ware of this nature found in the countries influenced by Arab civilisation is to be attributed to Siam, it has little if anything to support it. The dense stone-ware, with its full coloured enamel, produced in Siam during the past two or three centuries, is well known to connoisseurs, and there is no evidence that the keramic art of the country flourished notably in other directions at earlier periods. Recent researches, conducted by Sir Ernest Satow, C.M.G., then British Representative in Bangkok, at the request of the writer, do indeed go to show that céladon was among the ancient products of Siam. The great scarcity of old specimens in the market interfered with Mr. Satow's attempts, but in December, 1885, when on a tour in northern Siam, he visited a ruined city called Sawauk-halôk. More than five centuries ago a keramic manufactory existed in this city. Chinese workmen were employed there and possibly Chinese materials were sometimes used. Nothing now survives of the town but the fragmentary walls of Buddhist temples and the remains of the kiln. In the vicinity of the latter pieces of pottery are dug up from time to time. Mr. Satow secured three of them. They are evidently failures in baking, which were rejected as useless, and their condition alone, apart from other evidence, furnishes an almost conclusive argument against the probability of their having been imported from China in recent times and carried 400 miles to a ruined city never visited by any Western previously to Mr. Satow's tour. Among these three fragments was the body of a vase, now in the possession of the writer. Its pâte is coarse, reddish grey stone-ware, essentially different from the characteristic clay of Chinese céladon. But the glaze might easily be mis-