The Porcelain in Song and Yuan Dynasties
7 min readBeginning with the Song Dynasty, which reigned from 960 to 1279, when it was overthrown by Kublai Khan, the grandson of the famous Genghis Khan and the founder of the Yuan Dynasty, which ruled China until it was in its turn succeeded by the Ming Dynasty in 1368, we have a ceramic period marked generally by the primitive aspect of its productions.
Actual specimens of the time are now available for comparison with the descriptions of the writers on porcelain and the illustrations of the artists in the old albums which have come down to us.
The most useful of these last is an album of the 16th century in four volumes, found in the National Library of China in Beijing. This album, called the “Illustrated Description of the Celebrated Porcelain of Different Dynasties”, was the work of Xiang Yuanbian, a well-known connoisseur and collector of his time, and its eighty-three illustrations were drawn and coloured by him.
The seal in antique script attached to his preface gives his literary title as “A dweller in the hills of Mo-lin”. The productions of the Song Dynasty come generally with glazes of single colours, with either uniform or mottled tint, exhibiting either plain or cracked surfaces. Among the monochrome glazes are whites of various tones, greys of bluish or purplish tints, greens from pale sea-green celadon to deep olive, browns from light chamois to dark shades approaching black, bright red and dark purple. Especially notable are the pale purple, often splashed over with red, the brilliant grass-greens of the Longquan porcelain, called “onion-green” by the Chinese; the “clair de lune”, a pale grey-blue, and the deep purple or aubergine.
These kilns were also remarkable for the brilliance of their “transmutation” mottled tints, created by variations in the degree of oxidation of the copper silicates in the glaze. Cobalt blue, according to the annals, was brought to China by people from the Middle East as early as the 10th century and was first used in the preparation of coloured glazes, as we know nothing of painting in blue under the glaze until the Yuan Dynasty. The earliest “blue and white” dates from the 13th century, when the technical process of painting in cobalt on the raw body of the porcelain seems to have been introduced. The technique was perhaps borrowed from Persia, where it had long been used in the decoration of tiles and other articles of faïence, although porcelain proper was unknown to the Persians, except as an importation from China.
There were many potteries in China during the Song Dynasty, but Chinese writers usually refer to four houses of ceramic production (yao) as the most important: Ru, Guan, Ge and Ding. The celadon ware of Longquan and the flambé faïence of other kilns are less prominently featured in record. Ru ware was the porcelain made at Kaifeng in Henan province. The best was blue, which was said to rival the azure-tinted blossoms of the Vitex incisa shrub, the “sky blue flower” of the Chinese, and carrying on the tradition of the celebrated Chai yao of the preceding dynasty, which was made in the same province. The glaze, either crackled or plain, was often laid on so thickly as to run down like melted lard and end in an irregularly curved line before reaching the bottom of the piece. This is evident in various examples containing tinges of blue. Guan ware was the “imperial ware” of the Song Dynasty, guan meaning “official” or “imperial”, and the name is applied to the productions of the imperial potteries at Jingdezhen. The first factory in the Song Dynasty was founded early in the 11th century at the capital, the modern Kaifeng.
A few years later, the dynasty was driven southward by the advancing Tartars, and new factories had to be founded in the new capital, the modern Hangzhou, to supply table services for the palace. The glazes of the early Guan ware were rich and unctuous, generally crackled and imbued with various monochrome tints of which “clair de lune” was the most highly esteemed of all, followed by pale purple, emerald green (literally gros vert) and lastly grey. The Hangzhou Guan ware was made of a reddish paste covered with the same glazes, and we constantly meet with the description of bowls and cups with iron-coloured feet and brown mouths where the glaze was thinnest. A curious characteristic of all the above glazes is the occasional blotched red due to oxidation in the kiln, which contrasts vividly with the colour of the surrounding ground. These blotches sometimes accidentally take on the shape of butterflies or some other natural form, and then they are classified as a result of furnace transmutation. The ordinary Yuan tao or “Yuan Dynasty Porcelain” of Chinese collectors generally resembles the imperial ware of the Song Dynasty, as it is fashioned in the same way and differs only in comparative coarseness and inferior technique. The Ge ware of the Song Dynasty was the early crackled ware fabricated by brother potters in the jurisdiction of Longquan in the 12th century. The early Ge ware was distinctive especially for its crackling, which made it look as if it were “broken into a hundred pieces” or “like the roe of a fish” – the French truitée. The principal colours of this crackled glaze were pale purple, due to manganiferous cobalt, and “millet-coloured”, a bright yellow derived from antimony. Such was the original Ge ware. The name has since been extended to include every kind of porcelain covered with crackled monochrome glazes in all shades of celadon, grey and white.
The old, crackled ware was highly prized in Borneo and other islands of the Eastern Archipelago as far east as Seram, and it figures largely among the relics of ancient Chinese porcelain brought to our museums from these parts. Ding ware was made in the province of Zhili. The main product was white, but one variety was dark reddish-brown and another, very rare, as black as lacquer. The white was of two classes. The first was as white as flour; the second was of a yellowish, clay-like tint. This porcelain, usually of delicate, resonant body and invested with a soft-looking, fluent glaze of ivory-white, is probably more common in collections than any other of the Song wares. The bowls and dishes were often fired bottom upwards, and the delicate rims, left unglazed, were afterwards mounted with copper rims to prevent damage. Some were covered in plain white, the glaze collecting outside in teardrops; others had ornamental patterns finely engraved in the paste; a third class was impressed inside with intricate and elaborate designs in pronounced relief, the principal ornamental motifs being the tree peony, lily flowers and flying phoenixes. Qingbai ware, which is also notable, is the famous celadon ware made at this time in the province of Zejiang, the green porcelain par excellence of the Chinese, the seiji of the Japanese, the mariabani of the Persians. The Longquan porcelain of the Song Dynasty is distinguished by its bright grass-green hue, which the Chinese liken to fresh onion sprouts, a more pronounced colour than the greyish sea-green of later celadons. Jun ware was a kind of faïence made at Yuxian in the province of Henan. The glazes were remarkable for their brilliancy and manifold varieties of colour, especially the transmutation flambés that were composed of flashing reds passing through intermediate shades of purple to pale blue, which have hardly been equalled since.
The great variety of glaze colours turned out here in former times may be gathered from a list of Yuxian pieces sent down from the palace to be reproduced at the imperial potteries at Jingdezhen in the reign of Yung Chêng, the list comprising rose crimson, pyrus japonica pink, aubergine purple, plum, “mule’s liver mixed with horse’s lung”, dark purple, yellow millet, sky blue, furnace transmutations (yao pien) and flambés. These were all reproduced on porcelain in due course during the first half of the 18th century, and the new white body was in marked contrast with the sandy ill-levigated paste of the original pieces. The final porcelain ware of the Song Dynasty that demands notice and description is the Jian ware, produced in Jianyang in the province of Fujian, where the black-enamelled cups with spreading sides, so highly appre ciated for the tea ceremony of the time, were made.
The lustrous black coat of these cups was speckled and dappled all over with spots of silvery white, simulating the fur of a hare or the breast of a grey partridge, hence the names of “hare’s fur glaze” and “partridge cups” that were given to the creations by connoisseurs. These little teacups were valued also by the Japanese for use in their elaborate formal tea ceremonies; they paid immense prices and mounted the cups with silver rims, adhering pieces together with gold lacquer when the porcelain was broken. The more recent Chien Yao, it must be noted, which was fabricated after the time of the Ming Dynasty at Dehua in the same province, is altogether different from the Jian ware of the Song which has just been described, being the velvety white porcelain sometimes known as blanc de Chine, which will be described presently.
