China Revolutionized - John Stuart Thomson

One of the most ornate pagodas in China, near Shanghai. Surrounding temple buildings are now frequently used for schools.

Steel truss bridges on modern roads; sentry box for modern police; modern flats; felt hats, modern umbrellas; telephone wires, steam launches of the New China.

The Japanese type of girlhood, as contrasted with the Chinese, shown in another photograph.

The typical Chinese rug shows beautiful apricot ground, spangled with blue medallions. Rich brown and gold rugs are also frequently made, the centers of weaving being Tientsin, Nanking, Hangchow, Canton, etc. The most accessible places where specimens are shown are the large museums. The yellow rugs are used in China in connection with the red tile floorings, and the brown rugs are used often upon blue-tiled floorings, so that if one would catch the true Chinese ensemble, a colored crash must be used in connection with the rugs. Some critics are hasty in declaring that a Chinese rug is glaring when they place a yellow rug on a yellow floor! Chinese rugs were made generally for temples, imperial and viceregal yamens, mandarins’ yamens, and guild halls, as the designs often reveal. Rugs exist which were woven as long ago as the reign of the native Ming kings, fifteenth century. Other rugs date from the Kang Hi and Chien Lung reigns of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Temple rugs five by eight feet, or a little over, come from Buddhist monasteries. The ground, as one would expect, is orange, ornamented with clouds, water, figures of Buddha or his mother, Kun Yam, and the zodiac. Imperial Manchu rugs employ the Manchu dragon. Each rug differs slightly, as the artist trusted to his eye alone in following the pattern which hung over his head.

China is almost depleted of her ceramic treasures. The Anglo-French expedition of 1860 under Lord Wolseley destroyed the Emperor Hien Fung’s summer and other palaces near Peking. Some of the allies of 1900 looted Peking itself. The Manchus in the 1911–12 revolution sold the Peking, Mukden and Jehol palace treasures. The collection of the Roman Bishop of Peking, Monsieur Favier, gathered during a long life, was sold in New York in 1912. The Taiping rebellion of 1854 swept bare the pottery province of Kiangsi, and the distress following the 1911–12 revolution and the floods of 1910–11–12 sent the hidden treasures of the Yangtze and Hwei River provinces to the block. An artist of the King Teh Ching potteries would now have to resort to Occidental museums to find his models of cloisonné and champlevé enamels studded with precious stones; yellow and red Lang Yao monochromes of inimitable purity; Ku Hsu Hsuan translucent glass; Kang Hi hawthorn, ginger, and peach-bloom vases, round and square; Yung Cheng landscape and fish vases; flaming jars of the royal Mings; egg shell, rose, green, peony, medallion, dragon, lion vases and plaques of Yung Cheng and Chien Lung periods; the joyous, finely finished pottery of the Kang Hi (seventeenth century period); the rugged, strong, stern work of the tenth century; strutting camels, grinning griffins, spirited horses; the elegant, soft Ming work; the square, flower-covered, green and yellow vases of the sixteenth century; bulging vases of the seventeenth century, with green decoration on a blue ground, as fine as a mixture of emeralds and amethysts; awful gods and funny men stepping about in priceless porcelain. It was not a slight price that to attain political liberty China had to lose her artistic soul. More fortunate Japan never had to pay this price, though she had little art and architecture to lose as compared with the rich and glorious treasures of vast China. A remarkable catalogue of Chinese porcelains with two hundred and fifty-four gorgeously colored plates was written by Messrs. Gorer and Blacker and published by Quaritch, London, in 1912.