Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 1.djvu/422

a second firing at reduced temperatures. Yet while possessing this knowledge, the Chinese expert, in the great majority of cases, did not depart from his old-fashioned method of applying the glazing material to the unstoved piece and subjecting both pâte and glaze to the same degree of temperature. Is it conceivable that the great technical inconvenience of the latter process would have been wantonly endured by a keramist skilled also in the former, unless some compensatory advantage were obtained? The more reasonable supposition is, that, though the absorbent properties of porcelaine dégourdie and the ease of glazing it were well known at Ching-tê-chên, the Chinese keramist deliberately chose the incomparably more troublesome and unsafe plan of applying his glazes to the unstoved pâte, because by no other process could he obtain the lustre, depth, and softness so highly prized by his country's connoisseurs. Japan, China's pupil and confessedly her inferior in the technicalities of porcelain manufacture, always used the su-yaki-gama, or kiln for stoving porcelain before glazing. Her potters, however, adopted this simpler process, not wholly from choice, but because the materials immediately available to them for manufacturing the porcelain mass were too refractory to permit varieties of composition such as those habitually resorted to in China. In this branch of his art the Ching-tê-chên expert was deeply versed. Some of his most delicate and beautiful monochromatic glazes are found, not on true porcelain, but on fine stone-ware. The Japanese, on the other hand, had to content themselves with a lower range of technical excellence, and they naturally eschewed a process which, in their case, offered no adequate compensa-