The Wei dynasty, to which Tsaou-tsaou belonged, reigned in northern China, and at this day a considerable manufacture of glass is carried on at Po-shan-hien in Shantung, which it would seem has existed for a long period. The Rev. A. Williamson (Journeys in North China, i. 131) says that the glass is extremely pure, and is made from the rocks in the neighbourhood. The rocks are probably of quartz, i.e. rock crystal, a correspondence with Pliny’s statement respecting Indian glass which seems deserving of attention.
Whether the making of glass in China was an original discovery of that ingenious people, or was derived via Ceylon from Egypt, cannot perhaps be now ascertained; the manufacture has, however, never greatly extended itself in China. The case has been the converse of that of the Romans; the latter had no fine pottery, and therefore employed glass as the material for vessels of an ornamental kind, for table services and the like. The Chinese, on the contrary, having from an early period had excellent porcelain, have been careless about the manufacture of glass. A Chinese writer, however, mentions the manufacture of a huge vase in A.D. 627, and in 1154 Edrisi (first climate, tenth section) mentions Chinese glass. A glass vase about a foot high is preserved at Nara in Japan, and is alleged to have been placed there in the 8th century. It seems probable that this is of Chinese manufacture. A writer in the Mémoires concernant les Chinois (ii. 463 and 477), writing about 1770, says that there was then a glass-house at Peking, where every year a good number of vases were made, some requiring great labour because nothing was blown (rien n’est soufflé), meaning no doubt that the ornamentation was produced not by blowing and moulding, but by cutting. This factory was, however, merely an appendage to the imperial magnificence. The earliest articles of Chinese glass the date of which has been ascertained, which have been noticed, are some bearing the name of the emperor Kienlung (1735-1795), one of which is in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
In the manufacture of ornamental glass the leading idea in China seems to be the imitation of natural stones. The coloured glass is usually not of one bright colour throughout, but semi-transparent and marbled; the colours in many instances are singularly fine and harmonious. As in 1770, carving or cutting is the chief method by which ornament is produced, the vessels being blown very solid.
Bibliography.—Georg Agricola, De re metallica (Basel, 1556); Percy Bate, English Table Glass (n.d.); G. Bontemps, Guide du verrier (Paris, 1868); Edward Dillon, Glass (London, 1907); C. C. Edgar, “Graeco-Egyptian Glass,” Catalogue du Musée du Caire (1905); Sir A. W. Franks, Guide to Glass Room in British Museum (1888); Rev. A. Hallen, “Glass-making in Sussex,” Scottish Antiquary, No. 28 (1893); Albert Hartshorne, Old English Glasses (London); E. W. Hulme, “English Glass-making in XVI. and XVII. Centuries,” The Antiquary, Nos. 59, 60, 63, 64, 65; Alexander Nesbitt, “Glass,” Art Handbook, Victoria and Albert Museum; E. Peligot, Le Verre, son histoire, sa fabrication (Paris, 1878); Apsley Pellatt, Curiosities of Glass-making (London, 1849); F. Petrie, Tell-el-Amarna, Egypt Exploration Fund (1894); “Egypt,” sect. Art; H. J. Powell, “Cut Glass,” Journal Society of Arts, No. 2795; C. H. Read, “Saracenic Glass,” Archaeologia, vol. 58, part 1.; Juan F. Riano, “Spanish Arts,” Art Handbook, Victoria and Albert Museum; H. Schuermans, “Muranese and Altarist Glass Workers,” eleven letters: Bulletins des commissions royales (Brussels, 1883, 1891). For the United States, see vol. x. of Reports of the 12th Census, pp. 949-1000, and Special Report of Census of Manufactures (1905), Part III., pp. 837-935.
(A. Ne.; H. J. P.)
GLASS, STAINED. All coloured glass is, strictly speaking, “stained” by some metallic oxide added to it in the process of manufacture. But the term “stained glass” is popularly, as well as technically, used in a more limited sense, and is understood to refer to stained glass windows. Still the words “stained glass” do not fully describe what is meant; for the glass in coloured windows is for the most part not only stained but painted. Such painting was, however, until comparatively modern times, used only to give details of drawing and to define form. The colour in a stained glass window was not painted on the glass but incorporated in it, mixed with it in the making—whence the term “pot-metal” by which self-coloured glass is known, i.e. glass coloured in the melting pot.
A medieval window was consequently a patchwork of variously coloured pieces. And the earlier its date the more surely was it a mosaic, not in the form of tesserae, but in the manner known as “opus sectile.” Shaped pieces of coloured glass were, that is to say, put together like the parts of a puzzle. The nearest approach to an exception to this rule is a fragment at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in which actual tesserae are fused together into a solid slab of many-coloured glass, in effect a window panel, through which the light shines with all the brilliancy of an Early Gothic window. But apart from the fact that the design proves in this case to be even more effective with the light upon it, the use of gold leaf in the tesserae confirms the presumption that this work, which (supposing it to be genuine) would be Byzantine, centuries earlier than any coloured windows that we know of, and entirely different from them in technique, is rather a specimen of fused mosaic that happens to be translucent than part of a window designedly executed in tesserae.
The Eastern (and possibly the earlier) practice was to set chips of coloured glass in a heavy fretwork of stone or to imbed them in plaster. In a medieval window they were held together by strips of lead, in section something like the letter H, the upright strokes of which represent the “tapes” extending on either side well over the edges of the glass, and the crossbar the connecting “core” between them. The leading was soldered together at the points of junction, cement or putty was rubbed into the crevices between glass and lead, and the window was attached (by means of copper wires soldered on to the leads) to iron saddle-bars let into the masonry.
Stained glass was primarily the art of the glazier; but the painter, called in to help, asserted himself more and more, and eventually took it almost entirely into his own hands. Between the period when it was glazier’s work eked out by painting and when it was painter’s work with the aid of the glazier lies the entire development of stained and painted window-making. With the eventual endeavour of the glass painter to do without the glazier, and to get the colour by painting in translucent enamel upon colourless glass, we have the beginning of a form of art no longer monumental and comparatively trivial.