DYNASTY, 960–1279 A. D.
WITH the Sung dynasty firmly established in 960 A. D., the Chinese Empire entered upon a long period of prosperity rendered glorious by the cultivation of the arts of peace. It is true that the boundaries of the Empire were contracted and the Tartar tribes on the north–west had made good their independence and remained a constant menace to the frontiers of China. In 1127 the dam was broken and the desert warriors, no longer to be kept in check by diplomacy or force, burst upon Northern China and drove the peace–loving Sung from their capital, the modern K´ai–fêng Fu in Honan. The Emperor Kao Tsung and his Court fled across the Yangtze to their new capital at Hang Chou, where the dynasty continued under the name of the Southern Sung until 1279. The description given by Marco Polo of Hang Chou, which he considered, even in 1280, to be "beyond dispute the finest and the noblest city in the world," presents a wonderful picture of the refinement and luxury of the Sung civilisation. The great city had its network of canals and its twelve thousand stone bridges, its flourishing guilds of craftsmen, its merchant princes who lived "nicely and delicately as kings," its three hundred public baths of hot water, its ten principal markets, its great lake lined with houseboats and barges, and its streets thronged with carriages. The citizens themselves were peaceful and orderly, neither wearing arms nor keeping them in their homes, and their cordiality to foreigners was hardly less than the good will and friendliness which marked their relations to one another.
The conditions which produced such a community as this were ideal for the development of literature and art, and the Sung dynasty has been described as a prolonged Augustan age for poets, painters, and art workers of every persuasion. It was, moreover, an age of connoisseurs and collectors. Treatises were written on artistic subjects, encyclopædias were published, and illustrated catalogues issued by the order of the Emperor and his followers. Among the best known of these last publications are the Hsüan Ho po ku t´u lu, "Illustrated discussion of the antiquities in the palace of Hsüan Ho," and the Ku yü t´u p´u, "Illustrated description of ancient jade." It is true that modern criticism has seriously impugned the archæological value of both these classic works. It is said that ingenious conjectures and reconstructions, based on the reading of earlier literature, too often take the place of practical archæology and first–hand knowledge of the art of the Shang and Chou dynasties. Sung archæology, in fact, appears to have been in much the same theoretical condition as the Homeric criticism in Europe before the days of Schliemann. But for us these works must always have great interest, if only for the records they preserve of T´ang and Sung ideas. An excellent, if extreme, instance of the inherent weakness of Sung archæology is given by Laufer.[88] In describing certain objects of the Chou dynasty early writers had been in the habit of speaking of "grain pattern" and "rush pattern," assuming a knowledge in their readers which subsequent ages did not possess. In the Sung period the current ideas with regard to these patterns were expressed by the illustrator of the Sung edition of the Li Chi by ornamenting jade discs, in the one case with ears of wheat and in the other with a clump of rushes. Modern archæologists have identified the patterns in question on objects found in Chou burials, the grain pattern being symbolically rendered by a number of small raised discs, representing either grains of corn or heaps of grain, and the rush pattern by a kind of matting diaper, geometrically drawn. This instance serves to illustrate the salient differences between the Chou and Sung art, the two extremes; the Chou art is symbolical and geometrical, the Sung impressionist and naturalistic. The Sung poets and painters[89] communed with Nature in the wilds and threw into their verse or on to their silks vivid impressions and ideal conceptions of the natural phenomena. The Chinese art of after years owes many of its noblest inspirations to Sung masters, but nowhere are these ideas developed with the same freshness and power as in the Sung originals.
The Sung dynasty was an age of achievement for the potter. The ceramic art now took rank beside that of the bronze worker and jade carver, and it received a great impetus from regular Imperial patronage. The Ting Chou and Ju Chou factories in the north worked under Imperial mandate. In the south the pottery centre in the Ch´ang–nan district received a new name from the nien hao of the Emperor Ching Tê (1004–1007), and developed into the world–famed Ching–tê Chên. In the succeeding century the Imperial factories at Hang Chou were celebrated for the Kuan yao or royal ware; and numerous kilns were opened in the eighteen provinces, successfully following the lead of the Imperial potteries.
Subsequent ages have never ceased to venerate the Sung as the classic period of Chinese ceramic art, and in the eighteenth century the Emperor Yung Cheng sent down selected Sung specimens from the palace collection to be imitated by the Imperial potters at Ching–tê Chên. The same sentiment pervades Chinese ceramic literature. It harks back perpetually to the Sung wares as the ideal, collectors rave about them, and eulogy of the Ju, Kuan, Ko, Ting, and Lung–ch´üan wares has been almost an obsession with later Chinese writers.
Until recent years the European student has been almost entirely dependent for his knowledge of the subject on these literary appreciations or on relatively modern reproductions of the wares. Latterly, however, the interest aroused among Western collectors in the earlier wares and their consequently enhanced value have lured many authentic specimens from China, and our information on the Sung potteries has considerably expanded. But the difficulties of classification are still only in part surmounted. Many important problems remain unsolved, and for the understanding of several celebrated groups we are still at the mercy of Chinese textbooks and encyclopædias. Obscurity of phrase, ambiguity of colour words, quotations from early authorities passed on from writer to writer with diminishing accuracy, are among the many stumbling–blocks which the student of these books must surmount at every turn. Many of the treatises occur in small encyclopædias and miscellanies on works of art, which are each merely a corpus of quotations from similar works of the past. Moreover, an accurate first–hand knowledge of the wares themselves does not seem to have been held essential for the Chinese compiler. It is true that the same might be said of many of our own art–manuals, and with less excuse, for the Chinese can at any rate plead the veneration for the writers of the past in an ancestor–worshipping people, whereas our own shortcomings in this matter are due mainly to commercial reasons. But if the Chinese manuals are often misleading and obscure, they are at least brief—too brief, in many cases, and assuming a power to read between the lines which no European student can be expected to possess. The result is that where we have no actual specimens to help us, there is unlimited scope for conflicting theories on the meaning of the original text. However, as our collections grow and guiding specimens arrive, more of the Chinese descriptions are explained, and working back from the known to the unknown we are able to penetrate farther into the obscurities of the subject.
To take a single instance. The well–known celadon ware, with strongly built greyish white body, and beautiful smooth, translucent sea–green glaze, has been identified beyond all doubt with the Lung–ch´üan ware of Chinese books. When we read of the green porcelain (ch´ing tz´ŭ) bowls with fishes in relief inside or on the bottom, our thoughts at once turn with confidence to such specimens as Fig. 3, Plate 21, and we realise that for once we are certain of the meaning of the elusive colour word ch´ing. In the same way other phrases here and there can be run to earth; and when we meet the same descriptive words in other contexts, the key to their meaning is already in our hands. In this way no little profit can even now be got from the study of Chinese works, and it tends to increase steadily, though, of course, one living example is more instructive than a host of descriptions.
The Sung wares are true children of the potter's craft, made as they are by the simplest processes, and in the main decorated only by genuine potter methods. The adventitious aid of the painter's brush was, it is true, invoked in a few cases, but even then the pigments used were almost entirely of an earthy nature, and it is very doubtful if painting in enamels had yet been thought of. Two years ago enamel–painting on Sung porcelain would have been denied in the most uncompromising terms. But the claims of certain specimens of the Tz´ŭ Chou type, with brick–red and leaf–green enamel on the glaze, to belong to the Sung period have been so persistently urged that they cannot be entirely ignored. At present I am unconvinced of their Sung origin; but our knowledge of T´ang wares has developed with such surprising rapidity that we must be prepared for similar surprises in connection with the Sung. Meanwhile it would be well to suspend judgment on this interesting point.
The bulk of the Sung wares, at any rate, and among these the best of them, were either wholly undecorated—that is, wholly dependent on form and glaze, or else ornamented by such methods as moulding, stamping, application of clay reliefs, carving, or etching with a fine point. All these processes were applied while the clay was still unfixed, and the glaze was afterwards added and the ware finished once and for all in a single firing. It follows, then, that the glaze must be capable of standing the fierce heat required to bake the body, and as the Sung bodies are mostly of a high–fired porcellanous nature, the glazes used on them were limited to the refractory kinds composed largely of petuntse or porcelain stone. It follows also that any impurity, any particle of iron, for instance, in the clay would make its presence felt in the glaze and influence the colour of the latter, locally at any rate.
There is a striking contrast between the characteristic coloured glazes of the Sung and the T'ang periods. The latter are, as a rule, comparatively soft lead glazes, resembling in their colour, texture, and their minute crazing the latter glazes on Ming pottery. The former are thick and hard, and the crackle where it exists is positive and well defined.