As the ware is with few exceptions plain white or white decorated with incised, impressed, moulded, or applied ornaments of a rather formal and often archaic character, there will always be a difficulty in determining the date of the finer specimens, viz. whether they are Ming or early Ch’ing. The nature of the ware itself is a most uncertain guide, for one of the most beautiful examples of the material which I have seen is a figure of a European soldier which cannot be older than 1650. I need hardly say that owners of Fukien porcelain, particularly of the figures, habitually give themselves the benefit of this ever present doubt, and that these pieces are usually listed in sale catalogues as Ming or early Ming according to taste. This attitude is fundamentally illogical, for the ware is still made at the present day, and the Ming specimens in modern collections are likely to be the exception, and not, as optimistic owners would lead one to suppose, the rule. But in any case it will be more convenient to deal with the ware as a whole in the present chapter than to attempt the difficult task of treating its different periods separately, even though the bulk of our examples belong to the Ch’ing dynasty.
Tê-hua porcelain can be conveniently studied in the British Museum, where there is a fairly representative collection comprising more than a hundred specimens. It includes a number of the figures for which the factories were specially noted, of deities and sages such as Kuan-yin, goddess of Mercy; Kuan-yü, god of War; Bodhidharma, the Buddhist apostle; Manjusri, of the Buddhist Trinity; Hsi-wang-mu, the Taoist queen of the west; the Taoist Immortals; besides small groups representing romantic or mythological subjects such as Wang Chih watching the two spirits of the pole stars playing chess. But the favourite subject of the Tê-hua modeller was the beautiful and gracious figure of Kuan-yin, represented in various poses as standing on a cloud base with flowing robes, seated in contemplation on a rocky pedestal, or enthroned between her two attributes, the dove—which often carries a necklace of pearls—and the vase of nectar, while at her feet on either side stand two diminutive figures representing[248] her follower Lung Nü (the dragon maid), holding a pearl, and the devoted comrade of her earthly adventures Chên Tsai. The Kuan-yin of this group is reputed to have been the daughter of a legendary eastern King named Miao-chuang, but other accounts make the deity a Chinese version of the Buddhist Avalokitesvara, and it is certain that her representations as the Kuan-yin with eleven heads and again with a “thousand” hands reflect Indian traditions. In the latter manifestations the sex of the deity is left in doubt, but there can be no question on that head when she is represented with a babe in her arms as “Kuan-yin the Maternal,” to whom childless women pray, a figure strangely resembling our images of the Virgin and Child. Indeed, we are told[249] that the Japanese converts to Christianity in the sixteenth century adopted the Kuan-yin figure as a Madonna, and that there is in the Imperial Museum in the Ueno Park, Tokio, a remarkable collection of these images among the Christian relics. There is, however, another deity with whom this Kuan-yin may easily be confounded, viz. the Japanese Kichimojin, also “the Maternal,” the Sanskrit Hâriti, who was once the devourer of infants but was converted by Sakyamuni and was afterwards worshipped as the protector of children. This deity figures in Japanese pictorial art as a “female holding a peach and nursing in her bosom an infant, whose hands are folded in prayer. In front stand two nude children, one of whom grasps a peach, the other a branch of bamboo.”[250]
Among the Tê-hua porcelains in the British Museum are no fewer than nine specimens—groups, figures, or ornamental structures—with figures in European costumes which date from the middle to the end of the seventeenth century. One, a soldier apparently Dutch, about 1650, is well modelled in deliciously mellow and translucent cream white porcelain. Most of the others are more roughly designed, and vary in tint from cream to milk white.
It is said that the natives of the Fukien province are among the most superstitious of the Chinese, and Bushell[251] sees a reflection of this religious temperament in the nature of the Tê-hua wares. If this is so, they must have had exalted opinions of their European visitors, whom they often furnish with the attributes of Chinese divinities, representing them in positions and poses which seem to caricature native deities and sages. There is, for instance, an ornament in form of a mountain retreat with a shrine in which is seated a figure in a three-cornered European hat and a Buddha-like attitude. Another group consists of a European mounted on a ch’i-lin, posing as an Arhat, and another of a European standing on a dragon’s head which would symbolise to the Chinese the attainment of the highest literary honours.
There are, besides, in the British Museum collection figures of animals and birds, the Buddhist lion, the cock, the hawk, or the parrot, mostly fitted with tubes to hold incense sticks; and there are a pair of well modelled figures of Chou dogs.
As for the vessels of Tê-hua porcelain, they consist chiefly of incense vases and incense burners, libation cups shaped after bronze or rhinoceros horn models, brush pots, wine cups, water vessels for the study table and the like (often beautifully modelled in the form of lotus leaves or flowers), boxes, tea and wine pots, cups and bowls, and more rarely vases.
An extensive trade was done with the European merchants, whose influence is apparent in many of the wares, such as coffee cups with handles, mugs of cylindrical form or globular with straight ribbed necks in German style, and “barber-surgeons’ bowls” with flat pierced handles copied from silver models. Indeed, the superficially European appearance of some of these pieces has led serious students to mistake them for early Meissen porcelain and even for that nebulous porcelain supposed to have been made by John Dwight, of Fulham, at the end of the seventeenth century. Père d’Entrecolles[252] incidentally mentions the fact that some Ching-tê Chên potters had in the past removed to Fukien in the hope of making profits out of the European traders at Amoy, and that they had taken their plant and even their materials with them, but that the enterprise was a failure.
Conversely, the influence of the Tê-hua wares is obvious in many of the early European porcelains, such as those made at Meissen, St. Cloud, Bow, and Chelsea, which were often closely modelled on the Fukien white. There is, indeed, a striking similarity between the creamy soft-paste porcelain of St. Cloud and the creamy variety of the blanc de chine, both having the same mellow, melting appearance in the glaze.
Plate 86.—Fukien Porcelain, Ming Dynasty.