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.]