Plate 61.—Porcelain with san ts’ai glazes on the biscuit.
Fig. 1.—Wine Jar with pierced casing, the Taoist Immortals paying court to the God of Longevity, turquoise blue ground. Fifteenth century. Height 11½ inches. Eumorfopoulos Collection.
Fig. 2.—Screen with design in relief, horsemen on a mountain path, dark blue ground. About 1500. Height 14 inches. Benson Collection.
It will be seen from the above that the Hsüan Tê porcelains included a fine white, blue and white and polychrome painted wares, underglaze red painted wares, and crackle. The last mentioned is further specified in the Ch’ing pi tsang as having “eel’s blood lines,”[27] and almost rivalling the Kuan and Ju wares. The ware was thick and strong, and the glaze had the peculiar undulating appearance (variously compared to chicken skin, orange peel, millet grains, or a wind ruffled surface) which was deliberately produced on the eighteenth century porcelains.
Another surface peculiarity shared by the Hsüan Tê and Yung Lo wares was “palm eye” (tsung yen) markings, which Bushell explains as holes in the glaze due to air bubbles. It is hard to see how these can have been other than a defect. Probably both these and the orange peel effects were purely fortuitous at this time.
Of the various types which we have enumerated, the white wares need little comment. The glaze was no doubt thick and lustrous like mutton fat jade, and though Hsiang in his Album usually describes the white of his examples as “white like driven snow,” it is worthy of note that in good imitations of the ware particular care seems to have been given to impart a distinct greenish tint to the glaze.
The honours of the period appear to have been shared by the “blue and white” and red painted wares. Out of twenty examples illustrated in Hsiang’s Album, no fewer than twelve are decorated chiefly in red, either covering the whole or a large part of the surface or painted in designs, among which three fishes occur with monotonous frequency. The red in every case is called chi hung, and it is usually qualified by the illuminating comparison with “ape’s blood,” and in one case it is even redder than that!
The expression chi hung has evidently been handed down by oral traditions, for there is no sort of agreement among Chinese writers on the form of the first character. The T’ao lu uses the character