Plate 53 illustrates a beautiful vase in the Eumorfopoulos Collection which belongs to a cognate group. It has a buff stoneware body, the ornament is outlined in relief, and the glazes which fill the outlines are very similar to those of our main group, though some of the colours are more transparent and glassy and wanting in the solidity of the latter. The chrysanthemum handles are a frequent feature of the vases of this class, of which a notable instance is in the Salting Collection. Plate 54 illustrates another vase of similar kind, but with lotus handles, lotus designs, and a fine turquoise ground. Of the same type, but less rare, are certain wide–mouthed jars, bowls, and flower pots with bold floral designs, lotuses, etc., outlined in fillets of clay and filled with the same kinds of glaze, the background now turquoise and now aubergine (Plate 58, Fig. 1). The base is usually washed over with a thin purplish brown. These several types were copied in the Japanese Kishiu pottery in the nineteenth century, and though the copies are rarely difficult to distinguish by the eye alone the Japanese glazes (particularly the aubergine) will be found on handling to have a peculiar moist and rather sticky surface. Though no doubt of Ming origin, it is extremely probable that the manufacture of the Chinese bowls and flower pots of this class continued into the last dynasty.
Fig. 2 of Plate 56 exemplifies another kind of pottery with fine white body like pipeclay, and usually with sharply moulded designs in antique bronze style and in the bronze forms of beakers and four–legged incense burners. The glaze is usually leaf green, but it often breaks out into a frothy grey scum, such as is seen on some of the Canton and Yi–hsing glazed pottery. It is a common practice to label these wares as T´ang, but I am inclined to place them in a much more recent period (seventeenth or eighteenth century), and to locate them among the miscellaneous Kuangtung wares, pending further information on the subject.
There are other specimens with a somewhat similar white and relatively soft body material, not glazed but stained with a brownish black dressing of clay, and somewhat recalling bronze. These are usually vases of elegant, well–moulded form, such as Plate 56, Fig. 3, and they are often marked Nan hsiang t´ang.[425] They are, no doubt, of relatively modern make.
Though it would be easy to suggest many possible places of origin for these wares, such speculation can be of no real value without far more definite evidence than we possess at present. Still, it may serve some useful purpose in the future, if not at once, if we add one or two more records, however meagre, to the existing lists of Chinese potteries. The section of the T´u shu, which is devoted to T´ao kung (the pottery industry), mentions the following factories as of some importance in the Ming dynasty. In the province of Honan, in addition to the well–known potteries of Chün Chou and Ju Chou, we read that there was a factory in the Ju–ning Fu at the village of Ts´ai
, which was intermittently active in the first half of the fifteenth century.[426]
From another passage we learn that in the valleys of Ching[427]
and the hills of Shu (or Szech´uan) there are black and yellow clays suitable for pottery; that the potters had their kilns in holes in the mountains; and that they used the yellow clay for the body of the ware and overlaid it with the black, making jars, drug pots, cauldrons, pots, dishes, bowls, sacrificial vessels, and the like. They also made one kind of ware which resembled that of Chün Chou.
Specimens of modern pottery in the Field Museum, Chicago, include ornamental wares such as pomegranate–shaped water pots, etc., covered with an oily green glaze recalling some of the Sung types. The body is apparently dark coloured, and shows brown at the edges where the glaze is thin. This ware is made at Ch´êng–tu in Szech´uan.