A poor illustration of one of these is given in Hsiang’s Album,[59] and we are told in the accompanying text that the glaze is fên pai, “white like rice powder,” while the decoration, a band of oblique vine clusters and tendrils, is merely described as wu ts’ai (polychrome), but it is obviously too slight to be executed by any other method than painting with enamels on the glaze. The price paid for this cup is stated as one hundred taels (or ounces) of silver.
2. Chicken cups (chi kang), shaped like the flat-bottomed, steep-sided, and wide-mouthed fish bowls (kang), and painted in colours with a hen and chickens beneath a flowering plant.
A valuable commentary on Ch’êng Hua porcelains is given by a late seventeenth-century writer in notes appended to various odes (e.g. on a “chicken cup” and on a Chün Chou vase). The writer is Kao Tan-jên, who also called himself Kao Chiang-ts’un, the name appended to a long dissertation on a Yüan dynasty silver wine cup, which now belongs to Sir Robert Biddulph and was figured in the Burlington Magazine.[60] “Ch’êng Hua wine cups,” he tells us, “include a great variety of sorts. All are of clever workmanship and decoration, and are delicately coloured in dark and light shades. The porcelain is lustrous and clear, but strong. The chicken cups are painted with a mu tan peony, and below it a hen and chicken, which seem to live and move.” Another writer[61] of the same period states that he frequented the fair at the Tz’ŭ-iên temple in the capital, where porcelain bowls were exhibited, and rich men came to buy. For Wan Li porcelain the usual price was a few taels of silver; for Hsüan Tê and Ch’êng Hua marked specimens two to five times that amount; but “chicken cups” could not be bought for less than a hundred taels, and yet those who had the means did not hesitate to buy, and porcelain realised higher prices than jade.
An illustration in Hsiang’s Album[62] gives a poor idea of one of these porcelain gems, which is described as having the sides thin as a cicada’s wing, and so translucent that the fingernail could be seen through them. The design, a hen and chicken beside a cock’s-comb plant growing near a rock, is said to have been in the style of a celebrated Sung artist. The painting is in “applied colours (fu sê), thick and thin,” and apparently yellow, green, aubergine and brown. Like that of the grape-vine cup, it is evidently in enamels on the glaze.
3. Ruby red bowls (pao shao wan)[63] and cinnabar red dishes (chu sha p’an). These were, no doubt, the same as the “precious stone red (pao shih hung) and cinnabar bowls red as the sun,” described in the chapter on Hsüan Tê porcelain. Kao Chiang-ts’un remarks on these that “among the Ch’êng wares are chicken cups, ruby red bowls, and cinnabar dishes, very cleverly made, and fine, and more costly than Sung porcelain.”
4. Wine cups with figure subjects and lotuses.
5. “Blue and white” (ch’ing hua) wine cups, thin as paper.
6. Small cups with plants and insects (ts’ao ch’ung).[64]
7. Shallow cups with the five sacrificial altar vessels (wu kung yang).
8. Small plates for chopsticks, painted in colours.