The vases and bowls are of all sizes and shapes. The biggest ovoid vases with dome-shaped covers may stand in the hall on carved stands; indeed, they are found in similar positions in many of the palaces of India, Persia, and Europe.
The flower vases form an important group, and as in Japan, there is quite a library of illustrated work devoted to them. Both the shape and the decoration of the vase are dependent upon the flowers it is destined to hold, and the arrangement and combination of these flowers is regulated by rival schools of specialists.
The combination of five pieces to form a garniture de cheminée is not altogether a European idea. The Chinese have a similar combination—the Wu-shê, or set of five; but with them an uncovered vase is preferred for the central piece. For the service of the dinner-table there are many forms: among the cups, plates, and dishes of all shapes and sizes we may select for mention the dishes with covers indicating by their shapes the contents—fish, birds, or fruit. With these we may compare the similar forms made at one time at Chelsea and elsewhere. There are, again, the compound dishes in the form of flowers, each petal forming a compartment. Finally, we must not forget the tall, cylindrical mugs with crown-like tops, used for cooling drinks in summer, or among the Mongols for their koumis.
There are also certain forms made chiefly, but not exclusively, for the Mohammedan west. Of these, we may mention the bases for the hookah, recognisable by the small, straight spouts at the side to which the flexible smoking-tube is attached; the scent-sprinklers with tall, narrow necks; and the hand-spittoons with globular body and wide-spreading orifice,—these last, by the way, are used in China also.
It is not known to what date we can refer the oldest of the little medicine-flasks (Chinese yao-ping) which have in later times been used as snuff-bottles. They seem to have been carried westward in large numbers by the Arab traders, and that from an early date. In shape and size they have varied little.[87] Those found so abundantly in Egypt are generally very small, and are often shaped in imitation of a flattened vase with a square foot: some of them are of a rough-looking celadon, others are covered with a green enamel with white reserves. These are the little bottles that found themselves suddenly so famous towards the beginning of the last century, when they were extracted by the Arabs from Egyptian tombs of early dynasties. Somewhat later they encountered some rivals in the small seals of white Chinese porcelain which were discovered in the Irish bogs!
We can only mention in passing a few of the innumerable subsidiary uses which porcelain is made to serve in China, taking the place of so many other materials, above all of metal:—fittings for furniture, especially for the bedstead, frames for the abacus, or calculating-table, knobs for walking-sticks and hanging scrolls, boxes of various shapes and sizes for cosmetics, buttons, bracelets, and hair-ornaments. Finally, the very fragments, what we should call pot-sherds, of the oldest wares, especially when fine in colour, may be found mounted in gold or silver and worn as personal ornaments.
We started our sketch of Chinese porcelain with a rough historical division into three classes. We are now concerned only with questions of glazes and decoration, and we shall find that the apparently innumerable varieties of Chinese porcelain fall, with few exceptions, under one or other of the following heads:—
1. White, or nearly white, ware, which may be glazed or unglazed.
2. Single-glaze wares, either true monochromes or, if of more than one colour, the variety of colour arising from changes brought about in the single glaze during the firing.
3. Porcelain decorated under the glaze. Chiefly blue, less often blue combined with red, or red alone.