ii2 Beginnings of Porcelain 



and was low in price. This passage is found in the Cheng lei pen ts'ao, 

 a learned pharmacopoeia written by the physician T'ang Shen-wei, 

 and first published in 1108. This text allows of the inference that 

 porcelain clay was known in the latter part of the fifth or beginning 

 of the sixth century; but I should not go so far as to conclude with 

 Hirth that T'ao Hung-king "would have surely mentioned the use of 

 porcelain earth in the manufacture of chinaware if in his time it had 

 been so used on an extensive scale," and that "in the sixth century, 

 when he wrote, the use of porcelain earth for pottery purposes was 

 unknown." This argument, drawn from the mere silence of a writer, 

 is not conclusive: it seems preferable to think, that, judging from the 

 trend of his mind and the direction of his studies, the author was not 

 at all interested in the subject of pottery. What attracted him were 

 not the artifacts of men, but the substances and wonders of nature, 

 that might reveal healing-properties for the benefit of his suffering 

 fellow-men. Even in speaking of the application of kaolin to pictorial 

 subjects or decorative designs, he does not mean to offer a contribution 

 to technology, but he incidentally drops this remark by way of defini- 

 tion, in order to render himself intelligible to his contemporaries as to 

 the matter under discussion; for he says literally, "This [that is, the 

 white clay here in question] is identical with that now largely utilized 

 in painting, and low in price. Customarily it is but seldom admin- 

 istered in prescriptions." l The subsequent works dealing with pharma- 

 cology, while they give some notice to porcelain clay on account of its 



for the ornamentation of a surface in pottery vessels. The latter process is now well 

 known to us through numerous specimens of the T'ang period. The Pen ts'ao kang 

 mu of Li Shi-chen (section on clays, Ch. 7, p. 1) has the reading hua kia yung ^I^^J 

 (instead of hua yung of the Cheng lei pen ts'ao), which means "used by painters." 



1 Hirth pointed out another text in the Cheng lei pen ts'ao, which, he stated, is 

 quoted from the T'ang pen ts'ao, the pharmacopoeia of the T'ang period, compiled 

 about the year 650. In the edition of the Cheng lei pen ts'ao before me, issued in 

 I 5 2 3 (Ch. 5, fol. 25), the passage in question, however, is cited from a work styled 

 T'ang pen yii (that is, " Remains of the T 'ang Herbal " ) , and introduced by the words, 

 "The commentary says." I venture to doubt that this work T'ang pen yii is strictly 

 identical with the T'ang pen ts'ao described by Bretschneider (Bot. Sin., pt. 1, 

 p. 44), especially for the reason that a quite different extract from the T'ang pen is 

 quoted in the Cheng lei pen ts'ao shortly before this passage, and that in this work 

 quotations from the former are constantly referred to the T'ang pen or T'ang pen chu 

 (apparently the annotations of the drawings mentioned by Bretschneider). Be 

 this as it may, there is no doubt that the text brought to light by Hirth comes down 

 from the T'ang period. This is also the opinion of Li Shi-chen, who, in his Pen ts'ao 

 kang mu (Ch. 7, p. 6 b), attributes the term "white porcelain vessels" (pai ts'e k'i) 

 to the Pen ts'ao of the T'ang. In the text translated by Hirth occurs a clause which 

 he rendered, "During recent generations it has been used to make white porcelain." 

 Hobson (Chinese Pottery and Porcelain, Vol. I, p. 146) has proposed a new transla- 

 tion of this passage, which reads, "During recent generations it has been prepared 



