CHINA
MONOCHROMATIC GLAZES
downwards hard-paste porcelain takes its place among the choicest keramist productions of China, the manu- facture of soft-paste porcelain loses nothing of its vogue. In the case of ware decorated with blue sous couverte, it has been shown that though the variety upon which, from the Hsuan-té (1424) era to the close of the eighteenth century, the potter lav- ished all the resources of his art-—— the variety alone held in really high esteem by Chinese virtuosi — had soft and nearly opaque péte, yet large quantities of beautiful and attractive hard-paste porcelain were also produced. So it is with the white Yung-/o ware referred to by H’siang: soft-paste facsimiles of the celebrated Timg-yao and its later representative, the Shu-fu-yao, were successfully manufactured, but there also made its appearance a hard-paste porcelain so excellent and so far in advance of anything previously seen in the same line, that it became and has since remained the keramic feature of its era. This is the white egg-shell porcelain familiar to American and European virtuosi. Its great thinness and transparency suggest the idea that the porcelain clay has been entirely removed and the glazing material alone left. It was accordingly termed To-taz-ki, or ware of which the body (faz) had been removed (fo). Concerning this remarkable effort of technical skill, the Tao-/u contains the following information: — “The thin vases called Yo-tai-kz originated during the reign of the Emperor Yung-lo. At that time people prized vases which were comparatively thick and which are to-day commonly known as Puan-to-tat, that is to say, pieces of which the pate has been only half ( puan) removed. There is another variety, thin as bamboo-
paper, which is distinguished from the last by the
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