In addition to these, certain less familiar styles of ornament are found on the smaller objects, such as the heads of opium pipes, which are beautifully made and tastefully decorated. The red ware is sometimes coated with a transparent glaze of yellowish tint, giving a surface of warm reddish brown, exactly similar to the eighteenth century Astbury ware of Staffordshire; or, again, it is polished on the lapidary's wheel like the Böttger ware of Dresden. Inlaid designs in fine white clay and marbling are further varieties; and occasionally coloured glazes of great beauty occur. But these will be discussed presently.
There is no limit to the variety of articles made by the Yi–hsing potters, but they chiefly excelled in small and dainty articles for the writing–table, the toilet, and the tea–table, and personal ornaments. Their tea wares have always been highly prized in Japan, where they have been cleverly copied in Banko ware and by the Kioto potters. Similarly, when tea–drinking became an institution in Europe in the last half of the seventeenth century, and the East India companies set themselves to supply the necessary apparatus from China, the Yi–hsing red teapots became fashionable, and were immediately imitated by enterprising potters. The Dutch and English seem to have been the first to succeed in this new departure, and we read that Ary de Milde and W. van Eenhorn, of Delft, applied for a monopoly of the manufacture in Holland in 1679, while John Dwight, of Fulham, included the "Opacous, redd and Dark coloured Porcellane or China" in the patent taken out in London five years later. The brothers Elers, of Dutch extraction, started the industry in Staffordshire about 1693, and made red stoneware teapots scarcely distinguishable from the Chinese, and which sold for a guinea a piece.
The Yi–hsing wares in the celebrated Chinese ceramic collection formed by Augustus the Strong at Dresden supplied designs for the fine red stoneware made in the first years of the eighteenth century by Böttger, who also discovered the secret of true porcelain in Europe and founded the famous Meissen porcelain factory.
From the earliest days of their importation the Yi–hsing wares have been known in Europe, especially in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, by the Portuguese name of buccaro. The true buccaro is a scented pottery, first imported from Central and South America, where it was made by the Indian population and afterwards manufactured in Portugal and Spain; and Count Lorenzo Magalotti, who wrote in 1695, protested against the application of the name "to certain unglazed pieces of Oriental origin," asserting that "true Buccaro never came from China or Japan, and that they must not be looked for out of the pottery sent over from Central America or the Portuguese imitations."[404] But the protests of purists were unavailing, and buccaro seems to have become a regular term for unglazed pottery, even the archaic black ware from the Etruscan tombs receiving the name of buchero nero.
PLATE 51
Two Vases with glaze imitating that of the Chün Chou wares: in the Eumorfopoulos Collection.
Fig. 1.—Vase of Fat–shan (Kuangtung) Chün ware. Late Ming. Height 9 3/4 inches.
Fig. 2.—Bottle–shaped Vase, the base suggesting a lotus flower and the mouth a lotus seed–pod, with a ring of movable seeds on the rim. Thick and almost crystalline glaze of lavender blue colour with a patch of crimson. Yi–hsing Chün ware of the seventeenth century. Height 9 3/4 inches.
Another important group of Yi–hsing wares presents an entirely different aspect, and indeed it is little understood in Europe, though it is probably bought by unwary collectors for the Sung types which it purports to imitate. This is the Yi–hsing Chün, to which allusion has already been made in discussing the imitation Chün wares. The traditions of this manufacture go back to the Ming dynasty, when a potter named Ou