Some very creditable work seems to be still turned out from the Te-kua
district, to judge by the ware that finds its way to the shops of
Fuchow. Some enamelled ware appears to have been at one time made in
this district. In the British Museum are some small pieces decorated
with five colours (among them a blue enamel _over_ the glaze), which on
the ground of the nature of the glaze and the paste have been classed as
Fukien ware; while from the style of the decoration they would appear to
date from the early eighteenth century.
Much white porcelain, both the Feng-ting and the Fukien, was imported
into Europe from the end of the seventeenth century, and it forms an
important element in old collections. Some of this white ware, at a
later time, was decorated with colours in England and elsewhere, giving
rise to a class of porcelain that has caused some confusion to
collectors.
In China, white porcelain is used in time of mourning, at least that is
the case with that supplied to the imperial court.
Unglazed porcelain is comparatively rare in China, but figures of gods
or of animals are sometimes found in biscuit, and the little boxes in
which crickets are kept for fighting are generally of unglazed ware.
Again, where, as in the class of polychrome glazes, the glaze is applied
with a brush, some part may be left unglazed; and this practice has
survived in the case of the lions and kilins of the _famille verte_,
where we often find the biscuit exposed in parts of the face.
CELADON WARE.--As the white ware of King-te-chen--the _Ting_--has got
its name from the town of Ting-chou where it was first made, so the many
varieties of celadon[88] porcelain are connected in the Chinese mind
with the town of Lung-chuan, near the southern boundary of the province
of Chekiang. We have already given some space to this ware, so important
from the _cultur-historisch_ point of view, and we shall have to return
to it again when we come to investigate the routes by which the
porcelain of China passed in the Middle Ages to other countries. Here we
will merely call attention to the later revival of the celadon glazes
mentioned in a passage we have quoted from the letters of the Jesuit
father. But the highly finished porcelain, with a fine white paste
covered with a pale greyish-green glaze of uniform thickness and shade,
differs much from the old vases with ‘red mouth and foot.’ There is a
remarkably fine specimen in the Wallace collection at Hertford House
with chased metal mountings of the time of Louis XV., and other pieces
similarly mounted in the Jones collection.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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