CHAPTER IV
THE SUNG [Chinese] DYNASTY, 960-1279 A.D.
WITH the Sung dynasty firmly established in 960 A.D., the Chinese Empire entered upon a long period of prosperity rendered glorious by the cultivation of the arts of peace. It is true that the boundaries of the Empire were contracted and the Tartar tribes on the north-west had made good their independence and remained a constant menace to the frontiers of China. In 1127 the dam was broken and the desert warriors, no longer to be kept in check by diplomacy or force, burst upon Northern China and drove the peace-loving Sung from their capital, the modern K´ai-fêng Fu in Honan. The Emperor Kao Tsung and his Court fled across the Yangtze to their new capital at Hang Chou, where the dynasty continued under the name of the Southern Sung until 1279. The description given by Marco Polo of Hang Chou, which he considered, even in 1280, to be "beyond dispute the finest and the noblest city in the world," presents a wonderful picture of the refinement and luxury of the Sung civilisation. The great city had its network of canals and its twelve thousand stone bridges, its flourishing guilds of craftsmen, its merchant princes who lived "nicely and delicately as kings," its three hundred public baths of hot water, its ten principal markets, its great lake lined with houseboats and barges, and its streets thronged with carriages. The citizens themselves were peaceful and orderly, neither wearing arms nor keeping them in their homes, and their cordiality to foreigners was hardly less than the good will and friendliness which marked their relations to one another.
The conditions which produced such a community as this were ideal for the development of literature and art, and the Sung dynasty has been described as a prolonged Augustan age for poets, painters, and art workers of every persuasion. It was, moreover, an age of connoisseurs and collectors. Treatises were written on artistic subjects, encyclopædias were published, and illustrated catalogues issued by the order of the Emperor and his followers. Among the best known of these last publications are the _Hsüan Ho po ku t´u lu_, "Illustrated discussion of the antiquities in the palace of Hsüan Ho," and the _Ku yü t´u p´u_, "Illustrated description of ancient jade." It is true that modern criticism has seriously impugned the archæological value of both these classic works. It is said that ingenious conjectures and reconstructions, based on the reading of earlier literature, too often take the place of practical archæology and first-hand knowledge of the art of the Shang and Chou dynasties. Sung archæology, in fact, appears to have been in much the same theoretical condition as the Homeric criticism in Europe before the days of Schliemann. But for us these works must always have great interest, if only for the records they preserve of T´ang and Sung ideas. An excellent, if extreme, instance of the inherent weakness of Sung archæology is given by Laufer.[88] In describing certain objects of the Chou dynasty early writers had been in the habit of speaking of "grain pattern" and "rush pattern," assuming a knowledge in their readers which subsequent ages did not possess. In the Sung period the current ideas with regard to these patterns were expressed by the illustrator of the Sung edition of the _Li Chi_ by ornamenting jade discs, in the one case with ears of wheat and in the other with a clump of rushes. Modern archæologists have identified the patterns in question on objects found in Chou burials, the grain pattern being symbolically rendered by a number of small raised discs, representing either grains of corn or heaps of grain, and the rush pattern by a kind of matting diaper, geometrically drawn. This instance serves to illustrate the salient differences between the Chou and Sung art, the two extremes; the Chou art is symbolical and geometrical, the Sung impressionist and naturalistic. The Sung poets and painters[89] communed with Nature in the wilds and threw into their verse or on to their silks vivid impressions and ideal conceptions of the natural phenomena. The Chinese art of after years owes many of its noblest inspirations to Sung masters, but nowhere are these ideas developed with the same freshness and power as in the Sung originals.
The Sung dynasty was an age of achievement for the potter. The ceramic art now took rank beside that of the bronze worker and jade carver, and it received a great impetus from regular Imperial patronage. The Ting Chou and Ju Chou factories in the north worked under Imperial mandate. In the south the pottery centre in the Ch´ang-nan district received a new name from the _nien hao_ of the Emperor Ching Tê (1004-1007), and developed into the world-famed Ching-tê Chên. In the succeeding century the Imperial factories at Hang Chou were celebrated for the Kuan yao or royal ware; and numerous kilns were opened in the eighteen provinces, successfully following the lead of the Imperial potteries.
Subsequent ages have never ceased to venerate the Sung as the classic period of Chinese ceramic art, and in the eighteenth century the Emperor Yung Cheng sent down selected Sung specimens from the palace collection to be imitated by the Imperial potters at Ching-tê Chên. The same sentiment pervades Chinese ceramic literature. It harks back perpetually to the Sung wares as the ideal, collectors rave about them, and eulogy of the Ju, Kuan, Ko, Ting, and Lung-ch´üan wares has been almost an obsession with later Chinese writers.
Until recent years the European student has been almost entirely dependent for his knowledge of the subject on these literary appreciations or on relatively modern reproductions of the wares. Latterly, however, the interest aroused among Western collectors in the earlier wares and their consequently enhanced value have lured many authentic specimens from China, and our information on the Sung potteries has considerably expanded. But the difficulties of classification are still only in part surmounted. Many important problems remain unsolved, and for the understanding of several celebrated groups we are still at the mercy of Chinese textbooks and encyclopædias. Obscurity of phrase, ambiguity of colour words, quotations from early authorities passed on from writer to writer with diminishing accuracy, are among the many stumbling-blocks which the student of these books must surmount at every turn. Many of the treatises occur in small encyclopædias and miscellanies on works of art, which are each merely a corpus of quotations from similar works of the past. Moreover, an accurate first-hand knowledge of the wares themselves does not seem to have been held essential for the Chinese compiler. It is true that the same might be said of many of our own art-manuals, and with less excuse, for the Chinese can at any rate plead the veneration for the writers of the past in an ancestor-worshipping people, whereas our own shortcomings in this matter are due mainly to commercial reasons. But if the Chinese manuals are often misleading and obscure, they are at least brief--too brief, in many cases, and assuming a power to read between the lines which no European student can be expected to possess. The result is that where we have no actual specimens to help us, there is unlimited scope for conflicting theories on the meaning of the original text. However, as our collections grow and guiding specimens arrive, more of the Chinese descriptions are explained, and working back from the known to the unknown we are able to penetrate farther into the obscurities of the subject.
To take a single instance. The well-known celadon ware, with strongly built greyish white body, and beautiful smooth, translucent sea-green glaze, has been identified beyond all doubt with the Lung-ch´üan ware of Chinese books. When we read of the green porcelain (_ch´ing tz´ŭ_) bowls with fishes in relief inside or on the bottom, our thoughts at once turn with confidence to such specimens as Fig. 3, Plate 21, and we realise that for once we are certain of the meaning of the elusive colour word _ch´ing_. In the same way other phrases here and there can be run to earth; and when we meet the same descriptive words in other contexts, the key to their meaning is already in our hands. In this way no little profit can even now be got from the study of Chinese works, and it tends to increase steadily, though, of course, one living example is more instructive than a host of descriptions.
The Sung wares are true children of the potter's craft, made as they are by the simplest processes, and in the main decorated only by genuine potter methods. The adventitious aid of the painter's brush was, it is true, invoked in a few cases, but even then the pigments used were almost entirely of an earthy nature, and it is very doubtful if painting in enamels had yet been thought of. Two years ago enamel-painting on Sung porcelain would have been denied in the most uncompromising terms. But the claims of certain specimens of the Tz´ŭ Chou type, with brick-red and leaf-green enamel on the glaze, to belong to the Sung period have been so persistently urged that they cannot be entirely ignored. At present I am unconvinced of their Sung origin; but our knowledge of T´ang wares has developed with such surprising rapidity that we must be prepared for similar surprises in connection with the Sung. Meanwhile it would be well to suspend judgment on this interesting point.
The bulk of the Sung wares, at any rate, and among these the best of them, were either wholly undecorated--that is, wholly dependent on form and glaze, or else ornamented by such methods as moulding, stamping, application of clay reliefs, carving, or etching with a fine point. All these processes were applied while the clay was still unfixed, and the glaze was afterwards added and the ware finished once and for all in a single firing. It follows, then, that the glaze must be capable of standing the fierce heat required to bake the body, and as the Sung bodies are mostly of a high-fired porcellanous nature, the glazes used on them were limited to the refractory kinds composed largely of petuntse or porcelain stone. It follows also that any impurity, any particle of iron, for instance, in the clay would make its presence felt in the glaze and influence the colour of the latter, locally at any rate.
There is a striking contrast between the characteristic coloured glazes of the Sung and the T'ang periods. The latter are, as a rule, comparatively soft lead glazes, resembling in their colour, texture, and their minute crazing the latter glazes on Ming pottery. The former are thick and hard, and the crackle where it exists is positive and well defined.
Mr. W. Burton[90] makes some interesting comments on these high-fired glazes: "There are certain technical points of great interest to be drawn from a study of the Sung productions. In the first place, they prove that the Chinese, from a very early period, had learnt to fire their pottery at a much higher temperature than the contemporary potters of the West were using.... A third point of even greater interest, which seems to have escaped the notice of every previous writer, is that the method of firing used by the Chinese naturally produced glazes in which the oxide of iron and oxide of copper were present in the lowest state of oxidisation; and this is the explanation of the seeming paradox that the green glazes, known to us as celadon, and the copper-red glazes, were amongst the earliest productions of the Chinese porcelain-makers, while in Europe they have been among the latest secrets to be acquired."
The most important feature of the Sung wares lies in their glaze, which holds _la qualité maîtresse de la céramique_, as an enthusiastic French writer has expressed it. Its richness, thickness, lustre, translucency, and its colour and crackle are the main criteria of the wares in the eyes of Chinese connoisseurs. _Tzŭ jun_ (rich and unctuous), _hsi ni_ (fine and glossy), _jung_ (lustrous), _t´ung jung_ (lustrous throughout or transparent) are among the phrases most constantly met in their appreciations. A word, too, is usually added on colour of the body material, which in many cases would appear to have been of a red or brown tint, iron-coloured or copper-coloured. Not that it is necessary to infer that in every instance the ware was red or brown throughout. It is a matter of observation that in many of the early wares the exposed places (usually confined to the edge of the foot rim or the unglazed base) have assumed a rusty red colour in the firing, while a flake broken from the glaze elsewhere reveals a white or greyish white porcelain body within. This will often explain the seeming inconsistency of the Chinese descriptions in which the word porcelain is applied to an apparently dark-coloured material. At the same time, it is well to remember that the Chinese words which we translate as porcelain were far more comprehensive than our own term.
Our speculations on the nature of the Ch´ai ware in a previous chapter brought us face to face with two main types of glaze, the thick opalescent glaze of pale lavender or turquoise tint, and the smooth translucent celadon glaze in which green is the dominant colour. These types are prominent on the Sung wares, and almost all the varieties of coloured Sung glazes--with such obvious exceptions as black and chocolate brown--have more or less affinity to these two. So that if we place the old turquoise[91] glaze at one end of the series and the green celadon at the other, the rest will find an intermediate place, with leanings, of course, towards one or other of the extremes. One of the puzzling features in the study of the Sung wares is the interrelation of the various makes, such as the Ju, Kuan, Ko, Lung-ch´üan, Tung ch´ing and Chün, which all appear to have had points of mutual resemblance, although the descriptions of individual specimens differ over a wide range. If, however, it can be assumed that the same fundamental principles of manufacture were observed in all these factories, and that the divergences in the wares arose from local conditions, such as variety of clays, different conditions of firing and slight variations in the composition of the glaze, a formula is established which will cover most of our difficulties. I am assured by no less an authority on glazes than Mr. W. Burton[92] that this assumption is perfectly justifiable, and that one and the same glaze might emerge from the kiln as a celadon green, a grey green, dove grey, lavender grey, or lavender turquoise under slightly varying conditions of firing, and according to the presence or absence of an infinitesimal proportion of iron or copper oxide in the body or glaze. Even with their empirical methods the old Chinese potters must have soon discovered the conditions which favoured certain results, but in the meantime quite a number of apparently different wares would have emerged from the same factory, and yet, in spite of local peculiarities, a general relationship might be observed in productions of different districts. So that when one Chinese writer compares the Ju ware to the Ch´ai, another the Kuan to the Ju, another the Ko to the Kuan, and another the Lung-ch´üan to the Ko, it is not necessary to assume that these porcelains were all grass-green celadons because we happen to know that that colour was the prevailing tint of the Lung-ch´üan ware. The Ch´ai and the Lung-ch´üan may have been as far apart as lavender and celadon green, and the chain of relationship linked up by the Chinese writers still hold firm.
[Illustration:
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Plate 15.--Sung Wares.
Fig. 1.--Peach-shaped Water Vessel, dark-coloured biscuit, smooth greenish grey glaze. (?) Ju or Kuan ware. Length 5¼ inches. _Eumorfopoulos Collection._
Figs. 2 and 3.--Shallow Cup with flanged handle, and covered box, opalescent grey glaze. Kuan or Chün wares. Length of cup 7½ inches. Diameter of box 6 1/16 inches.
_Rothenstein Collection._]
No one but an experienced potter can speak with confidence of the methods by which the varying colour effects in the Sung glazes were obtained, but it is quite certain that the Sung potters were not ignorant of the value of such colouring agents as the oxides of iron, copper, cobalt, and perhaps even of antimony. Green, blue, yellow, and brown glazes, which owed their tint to these minerals, had appeared some centuries before on the T´ang wares. But to what extent the men of Sung made deliberate use of these oxides is another question. It is certain, for instance, that the green celadon owed its colour to the presence of iron oxide, but whether that was a natural element in the clay of certain districts, or whether it was introduced in the glaze by the admixture of ferruginous clay, is not always clear. Again, those bursts of contrasting colour, usually red, which enrich the opalescent grey and lavender glazes, are most readily explained by the local presence of copper or iron oxide in an appreciable quantity. No doubt these effects were at first accidental, but it is certain that observation and experiment eventually taught the potters to produce them systematically. Otherwise, how explain the appearance of these colours in symmetrical splashes? The _flambé_ glazes of the eighteenth century are known to have been produced by means of copper oxide, and it is not unreasonable to infer its presence in similar effects at an early date. But it is equally certain that many of the changing tints in the thick, uneven, bubbly glazes of the Sung and Yüan wares are due to opalescence alone. This has been proved to demonstration by Mr. Burton, who has produced from his kilns a porcelain glaze with passages of pale lavender, and even flushes of warm red, by using nothing but a thick, opalescent glaze entirely innocent of any colouring oxide.
Finally, a word of explanation is needed with regard to the frequent references to thinly potted specimens among the principal Sung wares. Almost all of the existing examples are of a thick and rather heavy type. Not that we would have them thinner, for much of their charm is due to the massive opulence of the thick opalescent glaze with its prismatic depths and changing hues. But the Chinese writers constantly refer to a thinner ware as well as the thick. Where are these thin and elegant pieces? The suggestion that, being more fragile, they have by now all perished has been coldly received as an obvious and easy answer to a difficult question. But it is reasonable enough, after all, when one remembers that upwards of a thousand years have passed since their manufacture. The alternative that they existed only in the poetical imagination of later Chinese writers is far less probable, though doubtless account must be taken of the exaggerations indulged in by men who were describing the ideal wares of a classic period. "Thin as paper," for instance, must have been a poetic licence as applied to the Ch´ai ware. I shall not cite the illustrations in the Album of Hsiang Yüan-p´ien[93] as proof of the fineness and trim regularity of the best Sung specimens. Whatever the value of this manuscript may originally have been, no reliance can be placed on the illustrations as reproduced in _Porcelain of Different Dynasties_.[94] The original was unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1888, and what we have now is, at best, the reproduction of a copy, and probably that of a copy of a copy. It is quite possible that the thinner Sung wares are still represented in Chinese collections, rare though they must of necessity be. But I believe that even our own collections are capable of supplying proof that, making reasonable allowance for verbal exaggeration, the Sung potters did make wares which could fairly be described as thin. Many of the white Ting wares are thin enough to be translucent; no one questions the correctness of the description as applied to them. It only wants one specimen to prove the case for the celadon glazes, and that may be seen in the beautiful bowl in Mr. Alexander's loan collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum (Plate 16). As for the Ju and Kuan ware, it is useless to consider their case until we are quite satisfied that we have established their identity; and in the nature of things the opalescent glazes and those described as "thick as massed lard" by the Chinese can only have accompanied a relatively thin body. On the other hand, many of the Corean celadons are of unimpeachable thinness, and as they were contemporary with the Sung porcelains and were almost certainly copied from them, there seems no real ground to withhold belief entirely from the Chinese statements with regard to the thinness of certain coloured Sung wares.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 88: _Jade_, op. cit., p. 17.]
[Footnote 89: See L. Binyon, _Painting in the Far East_, chap. ix.]
[Footnote 90: _Porcelain, A Sketch of its Nature, Art and Manufacture_, p. 56.]
[Footnote 91: This colour is quite distinct from the turquoise of the _demi-grand feu_, a more lightly fired colour familiar on the later porcelains.]
[Footnote 92: Mr. Burton's practical experiments and the beautiful results obtained by following out his conceptions of Chinese methods are well known to all admirers of the Lancastrian pottery.]
[Footnote 93: A late sixteenth-century work, published with translations by Dr. S.W. Bushell, 1908, under the title of _Porcelain of Different Dynasties_.]
[Footnote 94: I have already had occasion to criticise the inconsistencies in the colouring, etc. of this work. See _Burlington Magazine_, April, 1909, p. 23.]