Fig. 97.—The Porcelain Tower at Nanking.
The Nanking Tower ([Fig. 97]) once stood near the city of Nanking, from which city much of our finest porcelain comes. It was built with bricks or pottery, the face of which was coated with a dip or slip of porcelain; and the whole thing was valuable and interesting as a monument of the potter’s art. It is now razed to the ground, the last destruction being that of the Taiping rebels.
The history of pottery is in a good degree the history of man. All nations have done something in this way, from the rude clay pots of the barbarians, through the gayly-painted dishes of the incipient civilization, up to the culmination of the art, when perfection seems to have been reached in China through the centuries extending up to the sixteenth. This manufacture, which reached in China and Japan to the point of finest art, has not been surpassed by any civilized race, if equaled. I am unable to do anything but admire a people whose workmen did and liked to do such fine and faithful work, and found such large patronage for it; and it seems a ludicrous and stupid judgment for us, who admire and pay for the sculptures of Mr. Mills and Miss Ream, to call those peoples barbarians!
Are they not justified in calling us “outside barbarians?”
This chapter will treat briefly upon these Oriental productions, and I hope no apology is needed.
Three thousand years (2697 B. C.) before our Christian era these Chinese were great potters, had reached to a high point in form and decoration; and porcelain, the finest pottery, began to be made some two hundred years before our era. At that time our ancestors were in a state of gross, if not beastly, barbarism; while they showed skill, taste, refinement, in this and in other ways.
As late as the seventeenth century cups and trenchers of “honest tre,” or wood, were used in the best castles of England, and the dishes were often square bits of board; and down even to a much later day the fingers were used to carry the meat to the mouth.
Some two hundred years, then, before Christ, it appears that the Chinese had discovered and applied to the making of porcelain two fine clays, one called kaolin, and the other pe-tun-tse; the first is a decayed feldspar; combined, these clays produce the fine semi-transparent body which we call china or porcelain. All china, then, has in a greater or less degree this quality of translucency. It appears, therefore, that most of the Canton ware brought to us is not porcelain at all, but simply a kind of stone or earthen ware, coated with an enamel or “slip,” which sometimes may contain porcelain.
So, too, the most beautiful Satsuma ware from Japan is not porcelain, but a fine sort of pottery or earthen-ware, the decoration of which is most marked and harmonious.