Height 20 3/8 inches. Eumorfopoulos Collection.
Other architectural pottery in the same collection came from the Imperial pleasure grounds at Peking, which were wrecked in 1860. These include tiles and antefixal ornaments from the pavilions and temples in the Yüan Ming Yüan and from the Summer Palace, and a few blue–glazed tiles from the Temple of Heaven. Numerous tiles with relief figures and pottery figures from niches were picked up in the ruins of the temples and pavilions in the Imperial grounds after their capture in 1860; and many of the mouldings were found to display strong European influences, due, no doubt, to the designs of the Jesuits Attiret and Castiglione, who assisted the Emperor Ch´ien Lung in erecting some of the buildings. Some of these are in the British Museum besides antefixes in the form of yellow dragon heads from the Winter Palace at Peking and from the celebrated Temple of Kin–shan, or Golden Island, in the Yangtze; and a tile from the Huang–ssŭ, the Great Lama temple, built by K´ang Hsi in 1647. The tile in question is evidently part of a restoration, for it bears the date corresponding to 1770.
The ordinary tiles and mouldings are not likely to be extensively collected by private individuals, but many of the ridge tiles, with figures of deities, horsemen, lions, ch´i–lin, and phœnixes, have found their way into collections to which their spirited modelling has served as a passport. The glazes on these are often richly coloured, and include yellow, green, violet purple, aubergine and purplish black, and occasionally high–fired glazes with flambé or variegated colours. By accident or design, the figures are not infrequently detached from their tiles and mounted on wooden stands. The pottery figures from niches in the walls of temples and public buildings are often finely modelled and richly glazed, and, needless to say, they find a welcome in Western collections (Plate 58).
It is a common but illogical practice to assign all these figures in architectural pottery to the Ming dynasty; illogical, because so many of them have been brought from the Imperial buildings at Peking which are known to have been mostly erected in the K´ang Hsi and Ch´ien Lung period. On the other hand, nothing is more difficult to date than this type of glazed pottery, in which the ware, the colours, and the decorative traditions seem to have continued almost unchanged from the early Ming times to the present day. The tiles from the Nanking pagoda and from the eighteenth–century buildings at Peking are practically interchangeable.
Nor must we forget that the potters who made the architectural pottery often turned their hands and materials to the manufacture of vases and figures and other ceramic ornaments for domestic use, and even imposing altar sets for the temples. An important example of this work is seen in Fig. 2 of Plate 55, a large incense vase[446] of traditional form (from an altar set) with bowl–shaped body, wide mouth, two upstanding handles, and three feet with lion masks. It is ornamented with a peony scroll and two dragons in high relief, and is made of pottery with a dull turquoise green glaze. An inscription on the handles proclaims the fact that it was "dedicated by the chieftain Kuo Hsin–shê; made in the eighth year of Chia Ching," i.e. 1529. In more recent times the tile works near Peking have turned their attention to the manufacture of vases and bowls with rich soft monochrome glazes, yellow, green, turquoise and aubergine in the manner of the similarly coloured porcelains which are highly prized, and, as Bushell tells us, "the soft excipient (i.e. the pottery body) seems to impart an added softness" to the glazes. "The fact that yellow clay," he continues, "used often to be mixed with the porcelain earth in the old fabrics to enhance the brilliancy of the glaze colours, gives a certain vraisemblance to the fraudulent reproductions which I have seen sold for as many dollars as they would cost in cents to produce." It is unlikely that the issue of these by–products of the tile factories is confined to the neighbourhood of Peking. Among the miscellaneous potteries I should add that Ka–shan,[447] in Chekiang, is reputed to have been noted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for a fine porcellanous stoneware with opaque, camellia–leaf green glaze minutely crackled.
Plate 58.—Miscellaneous Pottery.
Fig. 1.—Jar with lotus design in green, yellow and turquoise glazes in an aubergine ground. About 1600. Height 6 1/2 inches. Hippisley Collection. Fig. 2.—Vase of double fish form, buff ware with turquoise, yellow and aubergine glazes. (?) Seventeenth century. Height 5 3/4 inches. British Museum. Fig. 3.—Roof–tile with figure of Bodhidharma, deep green and creamy white glazes. Sixteenth century. Height 10 7/8 inches. Benson Collection. Fig. 4.—Bottle with archaic dragon (ch´ih lung) on neck, variegated glaze of lavender, blue and green clouded with purple and brown. (?) Eighteenth century Yi–hsing ware. Height 10 inches. Peters Collection.