4. The decoration given by painting with glazes of more than one colour, probably always on the biscuit. We may call this the class of polychrome glazes.
5. The decoration painted over the glaze with enamels more fusible than the glaze on which they rest.
Plain White Ware.—The white ware made at Ting-chou, a town in the province of Chihli, to the south-west of Pekin, as early as Sung times, served as a type for all the many kinds of similar ware made in later days at King-te-chen. We have seen (([p. page 68]) that there was a variety, of the earlier ware, of creamy tint covered with a soft glaze containing lead; this is the Tu-ting, of which there are several specimens in the British Museum. It was, however, the pure white variety, the Feng-ting, that was afterwards copied. The colour of this ware, when not a pure white, tends to blue and greenish tints, and it is often finely crackled. This ware, especially the thin, translucent, egg-shell variety of the time of Yung-lo (1402-25), is much sought after by Chinese collectors.
But the greater part of the plain white Chinese porcelain in European collections was not made either at Ting-chou or at King-te-chen. It is rather to be traced to the only other important centre for the manufacture of porcelain that survives in China. This is the district of Te-hua (Tek-kwa in the local dialect), in the province of Fukien. This province had been famed in Sung times for its tea-bowls covered with a dark glaze, and we must remember that somewhere along its rocky, indented coast was situated the port of Zaitun, so famous in early days for its Arab trade. In later times the roadstead of Amoy came to rival Canton as a port of call for our ships; it is mentioned in this connection by the Père D’Entrecolles, and from it most of the blanc de Chine which at that time reached Europe was probably exported. For it was this Fukien ware rather than the white Ting porcelain that was imported into Europe from the latter half of the seventeenth century, to be copied in the earlier days of Saint-Cloud and Bow. In Spain it was a great favourite from perhaps an earlier date, and when the Buen Retiro works were started this ware was taken as a model.
This white ware does not seem to have been made at Te-hua before the Ming period, but it soon established itself as the pai-tsu—the white ware par excellence of China. It is distinguished by the creamy white of its paste and glaze—that is to say, the colour tends
PLATE XV. 1—CHINESE, PLAIN WHITE WARE
2—CHINESE, BLUE AND WHITE WARE
towards a warm, yellowish tint rather than towards the cold, pure white or bluish tone of most of the King-te-chen and still more of the Japanese wares. The satiny glaze appears to melt into the subjacent ground in a way that reminds us of some of the European soft paste porcelains.
It is the moulded ware that is most characteristic of the ‘Kien yao‘—vases with dragons in full relief creeping round the neck, incense-burners in many complicated forms, figures of Kwan-yin (whom we should not call the ‘Goddess of Mercy‘) in many incarnations; or again, Ta-mo (so well known in Japan as Daruma), the Bodhi-dharma who brought the faith to China, with overhanging brows and abstracted, solemn gaze. Among animals, the favourite is the lion, the so-called ‘dog of Fo,’ sporting with an open-work ball.