Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 1.djvu/93

THE CÉLADON

might be broached. Ultimately the Court regulated the conditions under which commerce should be conducted and determined the prices to be paid. Despite all this luxury, the household use of keramic utensils had not yet become habitual. Joints and leaves of the Palmyra palm served for dishes and cups which were thrown away after the meal was finished. Soon, however, the products of the Chinese kilns began to be appreciated. Chao Jukua, in his list of articles sent to Bruni—as gold and silver coins, brocades of Chien-yang and other silks, deer's horns, glass beads and glass bottles, bangles, rouge, lacquered bowls and plates—mentions "vessels of green keramic ware," and elsewhere says that "white ware" was exchanged for incense, laka wood, yellow wax, and tortoise-shell produced in islands in the vicinity of Bruni. Constant importations of these keramic specimens gradually changed the habits of the people until, as described in Chinese annals of the sixteenth century, they freely employed porcelain utensils, and for wooden coffins in burying their dead substituted Chinese jars "having dragons represented on their outer surface." Marryat, in his History of Pottery and Porcelain, quotes the following from Low's Sarawak:—

Among the Dyaks are found jars held by them in high veneration, the manufacturers of which are forgotten; the smaller ones among the land and sea Dyaks are common. They are called Nagas, from the Naga, or dragon, which is rudely traced upon them. They are glazed on the outside, and the current value of them is 40 dollars; but those which are found among the Kyan tribes, and those of South Borneo, and among the Kadyans and other tribes of the north, are valued so highly as to be altogether beyond the means of ordinary persons, and are the property of the Ma-

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