11. Wine cups with the design known as “the high-flaming candle lighting up red beauty,” explained as a beautiful damsel holding a candle to light up hai-t’ang (cherry apple) blossoms.
12. Brocade heap pattern[65]; explained as “sprays of flowers and fruit massed (tui) on all sides.”[66]
13. Cups with swings, with dragon boats, with famous scholars and with children.
The swings, we are told, represent men and women[67] playing with swings (ch’iu ch’ien): the dragon boats represent the dragon boat races[68]; the famous scholar (kao shih) cups have on one side Chou Mao-shu, lover of the lotus, and on the other T’ao Yüan-ming sitting before a chrysanthemum plant; the children (wa wa) consist of five small children playing together.[69]
14. Cups with grape-vines on a trellis, fragrant plants, fish and weeds, gourds, aubergine fruit, the Eight Buddhist Emblems (pa chi hsiang), yu po lo flowers, and Indian lotus (hsi fan lien) designs.
None of these need explanation except the Buddhist Emblems, which are described on p. [298], and the yu po lo, which is generally explained as a transcription of the Sanskrit utpala, “the dark blue lotus.”
Though the reader will probably not have the opportunity of identifying these designs on Ch’êng Hua porcelain, they will help him in the description of later wares on which these same motives not infrequently occur. The nine illustrations[70] of Ch’êng Hua porcelain in Hsiang’s Album, for the most part feebly drawn and badly coloured, form an absurd commentary on the glowing descriptions in the text. Their chief interest lies in their bearing on the question of polychrome painting. In some cases the designs have all the appearance of on-glaze enamels; in others they suggest transparent glazes or enamels on the biscuit. The colours used are green, yellow and aubergine brown, the san ts’ai or “three colours,” notwithstanding which the decoration is classed under the general term wu ts’ai (lit. five colours), or polychrome. The phrases used to describe the colouring include wu ts’ai, fu sê, t’ien yu, of which fu sê[71] means “applied colours,” which might equally suggest on-glaze enamels or on-biscuit colours, and t’ien yu[72] decidedly suggests on-biscuit colouring. On the other hand, in one case[73] we are expressly told that the “colour of the glaze is lustrous white and the painting upon it[74] consists of geese, etc.,” an unequivocal description of on-glaze painting.
Though the Ch’êng Hua mark is one of the commonest on Chinese porcelain, genuine examples of Ch’êng Hua porcelain are virtually unknown in Western collections. The Imperial wares of the period were rare and highly valued in China in the sixteenth century, and we can hardly hope to obtain them in Europe to-day; but there must be many survivors from the wares produced by the private kilns at the time, and possibly some few examples are awaiting identification in our collections. Unfortunately, the promiscuous use of the mark on later wares, the confused accounts of the blue in the “blue and white,” and the conflicting theories on the polychrome decoration, have all helped to render identifications difficult to make and easy to dispute. The covered cake box in the Bushell collection, figured by Cosmo Monkhouse[75] as a Ch’êng Hua specimen, is closely paralleled in make and style of decoration by a beaker-shaped brush pot in the Franks Collection.[76] Both are delicately pencilled in pale blue; both have a peculiar brown staining in parts of the glaze and a slight warp in the foot rim. In the British Museum piece, however, the foot rim is grooved at the sides to fit a wooden stand, a feature which was not usual before the K’ang Hsi period, and something in the style of the drawing is rather suggestive of Japanese work. There is, however, another specimen in the Franks Collection[77] which is certainly Chinese of the Ming dynasty, and possibly of the Ch’êng Hua period, of which it bears the mark. It is a vase of baluster form, thick and strongly built, with great weight of clay at the foot, and unfortunately, like so many of the early polychrome vases which have come from China in recent years, it is cut down at the neck. It has a greyish crackled glaze, painted with a floral scroll design, outlined in brown black pigment and washed in with leaf green, yellow, manganese purple and bluish green enamels, which are supplemented by a little underglaze blue, and the mark is in four characters in blue in a sunk panel under the base.
Though too clumsy to belong to any of the groups of Imperial wares described in the Po wu yao lan, this vase is certainly an old piece, and possibly the production of one of the private factories of the Ch’êng Hua period. In the Eumorfopoulos and Benson Collections[78] there are a few examples of these massive-footed vases, most of them unfortunately incomplete above, decorated in polychrome glazes with engraved or relief-edged designs, but not, as a rule, in on-glaze enamels. These are clearly among our earliest examples of polychrome porcelain, and we should expect to find here, if anywhere, specimens of the coloured porcelain of the fifteenth century. See Plate [64].
Though the fifteenth century was distinguished by two brilliant periods, there are considerable gaps in the ceramic annals of the time. The reign of the Emperor Chêng T’ung,[79] who succeeded to the throne in 1436, was troubled by wars, and in his first year the directorate of the Imperial factory was abolished; and, as soldiers had to be levied, relief was given by stopping the manufacture of porcelain for the palace. In 1449 this emperor was actually taken captive by the Mongols, and his brother, who took his place from 1450 to 1456 under the title of Ching T’ai,[80] reduced the customary supplies of palace wares in 1454 by one third. The reign of Ching T’ai is celebrated for cloisonné enamel on metal.