Plate 5 shows a fine example of a horse in coloured glazes, a fierce figure in warrior's guise, who is, no doubt, one of the Lokapalas or Guardians of the Four Quarters in the Buddhist theogony, and a figure of an actor. The amusements, as well as the serious occupations of the dead, were provided for in the furniture of the tombs. A whole troop of mimes in quaint costumes and dramatic poses is shown in the Field Museum at Chicago, and Plate 6 illustrates three seated figures of musicians as well as a standing figure holding a dish of fruit.
A study of the salient features of these and other authenticated specimens leads naturally to the identification of fresh types, and so the series grows. For instance, the type of wine vase with serpent handles is found in glazes of various colours, till of the mottled T'ang kind, and with slight additions, such as the palmette–like ornaments in applied relief on a large example in the British Museum. These ornaments in their turn appear on bowls and incense vases often of globular form, like the well–known Buddhist begging bowl, but fitted with three legs. Splashed, streaked and mottled glazes further declare these to be T'ang, and the varying colour and hardness of their body material give us a deeper insight into the T'ang ware. All of these show the marks of the wheel, and many are neatly finished with simple wheel–made lines and ridges; stamped ornaments in applied relief are their commonest form of decoration.
A fine specimen in the British Museum will serve to illustrate this type of bowl. It has a hard, white body, of typical globular form, with slightly constricted mouth, three legs with strongly modelled lion masks on the upper part, and between them pads of applied relief with lion mask ornaments. The glaze is not of the mottled kind, but is rather streaked; it is deep, cucumber green and minutely crackled, and has run down into drops under the bowl. This fluidity is also the cause of the streakiness of the colour, which was evidently a characteristic feature of the T'ang pottery, for it appears unmistakably indicated in a T'ang painting figured by Sir Aurel Stein.[46] This painting, a silk banner of the T'ang period, was found in a walled–up library at Tun–huang, and depicts a standing Buddhist figure carrying a begging bowl with boldly streaked exterior.
PLATE 8.
Three examples of T'ang ware with coloured glazes: in the Eumorfopoulos Collection.
Fig. 1.—Tripod Incense Vase with ribbed sides; white pottery with deep blue glaze outside encrusted with iridescence. Height 4 5/8 inches.
Fig. 2.—Amphora of light coloured pottery with splashed glaze. Mark incised Ma Chên–shih tsao ("made by Ma Chên–shih"). Height 8 1/4 inches.
Fig. 3.—Ewer of hard white porcellanous ware with deep purple glaze. Height 4 3/4 inches.
In addition to the mottled glazes—which, by the way, are the forerunners of the so–called "tiger–skin" porcelains of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—and the single colours already mentioned, instances have been identified on the principles already indicated of wares with a full yellow glaze and a streaky, brownish yellow. An interesting piece (Plate 8) in the Eumorfopoulos Collection is covered with a deep violet blue glaze on a fine white body. Others, again, have a dark chocolate brown glaze on a reddish buff body, and a rare ewer in the British Museum is distinguished by a deep olive brown glaze flecked with tea green, which seems to anticipate by a thousand years the "tea dust" glazes of the Ch'ien Lung period.[47]