The long period of prosperity enjoyed by China under the T´ang is famed in history as the golden age of literature and art. The age which produced the poet Li Po, the painter Wu Tao-tzŭ, and the poet-painter Wang Wei, whose "poems were pictures and his pictures poems," was indeed an age of giants. It is certain that the potter's art shared in no small measure the progress of the period, though at this distance of time we can hardly expect that many monuments of this fragile art should have survived. Indeed, it has been the custom of writers in the past to dismiss the T´ang pottery in a few words, or to disregard it entirely as an unknown quantity Here, however, we have again been well served by the ancient burial customs of the Chinese, which still held good for part, at least, of the T´ang period. The T´ang mortuary wares are similar in intention to those of the Han, but bespeak a much maturer art. The modelling of the tomb figures, which have been aptly compared with the Tanagra statuettes of ancient Greece, displays greater skill, spirit, and delicacy, and the materials used are more refined and varied. The body of the ware, which is usually fine as pipeclay, varies in hardness from soft earthenware, easily scratchable with a knife, to a hard porcellanous stoneware, and in colour from light grey and pale rosy buff to white, like plaster-of-Paris. The usual covering is a thin, finely crackled glaze of pale straw colour or light transparent green, and sometimes the surface has a wash of white clay between the body and the glaze. Some of the figures, however, are more richly coated in amber brown and leaf green glazes with occasional splashes of blue, while on others are found traces of unfired red and black pigments. But as the mortuary pottery[41] comprises the largest and most important group of T´ang wares at present identified, we cannot do better than consider it first and as a separate class, setting forth at once the reasons for assigning it to this particular period. As will be seen in the note to the previous chapter (p. 17), earthenware appears to have been to a great extent superseded by wood as the fashionable material for sepulchral furniture towards the end of the T´ang period. This in itself is strong _primâ facie_ evidence that the tombs furnished throughout with pottery are not later than the T´ang dynasty. Another argument of an ethnographical nature is supplied by the figures of ladies with feet of normal size. The fashion of cramping the feet, though it may have begun before the T´ang period, was certainly not universal until the end of this long dynasty.[42]