Chinese Porcelain

International Tract and Missionary Society · OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA · Jul 15, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 27.

Chinese Porcelain.

CONTRARY to a popular belief, which seems to have not yet been thoroughly exploded, the art of porcelain manufacture in China properly belongs to modern history. Those much-talked-of Chinese vases, found in Egyptian tombs, are now known by the very inscriptions upon them to have been manufactured about the eighth century of our own era—certainly not earlier; and it has been efficiently shown that up to 202 B. C., the Chinese had little knowledge of porcelain.

It is true that the invention of porcelain, which occurred under the Han dynasty, may be placed between 187 B. C. and 87 A. D.; but we have no precise knowledge of the date; and the probabilities are in favor of the younger era. There were no famous porcelains prior to the seventh century; and the first really beautiful manufacture would seem to have been under the Heou-tcheou dynasty, of about the middle of the tenth century. The porcelains then made by the order of Chi-tsong were sky-blue in color and very celebrated. Nothing of that manufacture is now known to exist; and the Chinese authors themselves declare that even a broken fragment of those porcelains would sell at the price of a precious stone, and be mounted in gold like a jewel.

Remarkable porcelains are known to have been made in the twelfth century, under the Song dynasty—in the Youen period, under the Mongol Emperors—in the Ming periods, between 1368 and 1649. But, except through the descriptions of Chinese historians, little is known to us of porcelains older than the latter part of the fourteenth century; and the vases which have come down to us from the Ming era are, for the most part, coarsely and clumsily executed. The manufacture of Chinese porcelain reached its highest development in the period called the Tcheng-hoa (from 1465 to 1487); but it had made great progress between 1426 and 1435, in the Siouen-te period. Nevertheless, the art of using cobaltiferous manganese for blue decoration belongs to the much later Tcheng-te period (1506–1521).—Sel.