The period from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) to the Five Dynasties (907-960) was a landmark for development of China's porcelain art. During that period, white
porcelain appeared in northern China and porcelain with underglaze paintings - porcelain with decorative patterns painted or cut on the roughcasts - in the south.
White porcelain features pure white roughcasts and glaze obtained by reducing the iron content in them. The earliest white porcelain vessels were produced under the
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A porcelain pillow of the Tang Dynasty. | Northern Qi Dynasty (550-577). Bowls, cups and long-necked bottles unearthed from the tomb built in 575 for Governor Fan Cui of Liangzhou. or what is now Anyang, Henan Province, are recognized as the best representatives of white porcelain in the early stage of its development. Both the roughcasts and glaze of these vessels are opal in color, with the glaze of some slightly blue.
White porcelain production techniques continued to improve during the Sui and Tang dynasties, with the pure white color more stable and the products more ingeniously constructed to the liking of upper class members. Many small beautiful white bottles, boxes and pots were unearthed from the tomb built in 608 for Li Jingxun, a great granddaughter of Emperor Wen Di of the Sui, who died at nine. Among these, the most remarkable is a pot with a chicken head and a dragon-shaped handle. The pot, 26.4 centimeters tall . is bright with pure white glaze. The chicken head and the dragon-shaped handle are in a style of artistic exaggeration, making the pot exceptionally attractive. No trace of blue or yellow is discerned in the glaze layer, indicating that white porcelain production techniques had become fairly sophisticated.
White porcelain kilns of the Tang dynasty were mostly
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A porcelain jar of the Song Dynasty. It is a product of the Jizhou Kilns. | in areas north of the Yangtze River, in Henan, Hebei, Shanxi, Shaanxi and Anhui Province, to be exact. In areas south of the Yangtze River, production of blue porcelain continued to develop. The best-known blue porcelain kilns were in Zhejiang Provinces, alias Yue, hence the "Yue Kilns" as historians choose to call them. Products identified as of the Yue Kilns, mostly bluish yellow or bluish green in color, are as bright and smooth as jade articles. They are in huge varieties - bowls, plates, wine and tea things, as well as lamps, pillows, spittoons, cosmetic powder boxes and inkpads. Large numbers of porcelain vessels produced at the time take the shape of flowers - bowls in the shape of lotus leaves or crab apple flowers, plates in the shape of lotus flower and sunflower petals, etc.
During the period of the late Tang and the Five Dynasties, the Yue Kilns were
designated to produce for imperial use. Their products are known as "discreet porcelain pieces" because they were strictly forbidden to people outside the imperial families. In a poem entitled the Discreet Yue Porcelains, Tang Dynasty
poet Lu Gui wrote:
Accompanied by late autumn wind and dew, the Yue Kilns start producing
With magnificent hue of the mountains are they bringing.
Though fascinated by the poem, people had given different interpretations to the meaning of "magnificent hue of the mountains" until they were able to see some of the real things. That came in 1987, when huge quantities of relics of the Tang
Dynasty were unearthed from the Famen Temple at Fufeng, Shaanxi Province, including 16 identified as Yue or "discreet porcelain pieces" according to an inventory of the relics buried alongside them. Two bowls are bluish yellow in color, and the other pieces are either bluish green or bright green, the glaze on them sparkling and crystal-clear. All of them are ingeniously constructed, featuring a simple, lucid style. Several of them are shaped like plants. One is a water bottle with eight raised edges round its body, which looks like a melon. There is also a plate formed with five flower petals.
Porcelain pieces with underglaze paintings dating to the period from the mid- and late-Tang Dynasty to the Five Dynasties , have been unearthed from ancient kilns in Shangsha of Hubei Province. They represent a breakthrough in the development of China's porcelain art. Porcelain artifacts of the Shangsha kilns are mostly brown or brownish green in color, suggesting that gone were those centuries when porcelain artifacts were almost exclusively bluish. Porcelain artifacts with underglaze paintings were produced by having decorative patterns painted or cut on their roughcasts before glaze was applied. The earliest such pieces are decorated with strings of brown dots and those produced later, with brownish green dots that look more beautiful. Porcelain artifacts of the Changsha kilns are unique in artistic style. The most remarkable are pots with straight spouts or spouts that look like white-edged morning glory, round, long bellies or bellies in the shape of melons or bags. There are also tube-like pots, octagonal pots and pots shaped like a column.
Porcelain objects with "twined roughcasts" represent a new school of porcelain art developed during the Tang Dynasty, for which the Dangyangyu Kilns were most famous. "Twined roughcasts" are produced by mixing white and brown porcelain clay in such a way as to form lines or dots alternately white and brown. Most porcelain objects with "twined" roughcasts that have survived to our time are pillows . In most cases, such porcelain pillows have three round flower patterns arranged in a neat triangle, for which they are known as "flower pillows".
The production process was very complicated and that explains why, more often than not, a flower pillow only has the surface "twined" while the part beneath the designs are produced just with white porcelain clay. Back in 1978 experts from the Palace Museum in Beijing unearthed a broken piece of a "flower pillow" from ruins of ancient porcelain kilns in Gongxian County, Henan Province. They found that in thickness, the surface of the pillow, the part with flower designs, accounts for only one third of the roughcast. |
