Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/68

 the Song-do céladon presents attractive features. Bowls, cups, ewers, and occasionally vases, their biscuit thin, their glaze smooth, their colour a delicate green, their incised decoration graceful and chaste, and their general technique good, indicate that the potters of the peninsula were not altogether distanced by their Chinese contemporaries of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Mr. W. R. Carles, sometime British Consul in Han-chung, says, in his "Life in Korea": "Song-do was formerly the place of manufacture of the best Korean pottery, but on the removal of the capital the trade fell, and the workmen, refusing to follow the Court, gradually abandoned their industry, the knowledge of which has now been forgotten. In the winter after my return to Söul I succeeded in purchasing a few pieces, part of a set of thirty-six, which were said to have been taken out of some large grave near Song-do. These are, for the most part, céladon ware, glazed, with a pattern running underneath the glaze. As described by a gentleman who examined them carefully, the main patterns appear to be engraved on the clay as fine grooves or scratches, and the subsequently applied glaze is put on so thickly as to obliterate the grooves and produce an even surface. They are made of an opaque clay of a light reddish colour, and appear, as usual with Oriental fictile ware, to have been supported in the kiln on three supports, and the supports used, in several instances at least, have been small fragments of opaque quartz, portions of which still adhere to some of them. In one of the smaller pieces is a radiate ornament in the centre, which appears to be made up of a series of irregular white fragments of quartz or porcelain, which must have been embedded in the clay before the baking, and some of which project above the surface, though thickly covered with the glaze." The illustrations of these specimens convey a good idea of the shapes and decorative styles in vogue at the Song-do workshops. In some cases the designs incised in the pâte were filled with white clay before applying the céladon glaze. A delicate and attractive effect was thus obtained. In this type a favourite design appears to have been cranes flying amid conventional clouds, hence called by the Japanese Un-kaku-de, or cloud-and-crane