Art Different from that of Europe or America.--How it must be Viewed.--Religion.--Legend.--Hoang-ti the Inventor of Pottery.--The Leading Points of Religious System.--Personified Principles.--Lao-tsen, Confucius, and Buddha.--Kuan-in.--Pousa or Pou-tai.--Dragons.--Dog of Fo.--Ky-lin.--Sacred Horse.--Fong-hoang.--Symbols.--Meaning of Colors and Shapes. As we approach China, we must prepare ourselves for the consideration of its ceramic products, by once and for all giving up the attempt to judge them by European or American standards. Whether or not art may have travelled to China eastward from the cradle of the human race, it certainly crystallized in China into distinctive forms. This fact must be constantly kept in mind, if we would succeed in appreciating at its true value the art of the Celestial Empire. As in criticising a book, it is less essential to measure the difference between one’s own ideas and those of the author, than to look at the subject from the author’s stand-point, and to examine the result from the inside, so, in estimating art, it is equally essential to enter into the artist’s views, and to study not only the ideal he means to portray or the real he tries to imitate, but also what he considers essential to imitation and portrayal, and the intelligence to which he addresses himself. [Illustration: Fig. 63.--Cheou-lao, God of Longevity.] We have seen that the Egyptians honored the gods through their works. The Chinese present us with a religion based, like that of the Greeks, Scandinavians, and many other nations, upon hero-worship. We recede from mankind backward to the time when heroes and gods are commingled, and reach the horizon where humanity and divinity are one. It is claimed for the Chinese that they are the only possessors of a correct, or at least an exact, chronology, but even it does not substantiate the existence of the first of human creatures, who is said to have lived well-nigh a hundred millions of years before the Christian era. Fou-Hi was the first man of whom we can take cognizance, and he lived B.C. 3468. Nearly eight hundred years afterward, Hoang-ti invented pottery and was translated, and the beginning of the manufacture may reasonably be fixed at that date. He did many other useful things besides inventing pottery; but what is now to be chiefly noted is that he was raised to the Chinese heaven for his beneficence. Behind this simple and almost universal hero-worship was a religion compounded of pantheism and a peculiar kind of spiritualism. Chang-ti bears some resemblance to the Egyptian concealed god Ammon, and those who choose may find similar counterparts to the creative and productive principles of the Chinese theogony. These were called the “yang” and the “yn,” and appear to be the active and passive principles personified in Ti and Che, the presiding powers of heaven and earth. In pottery, they frequently appear in connection with