Historical Notes on Kaolin 117 



meaning "to plaster or whitewash the floor or the walls of a house." 

 This is particularly evidenced by the verb yu Sfcfr ("to blacken"), 

 its opposite, to which it is closely linked in order to express the per- 

 formance of a religious ceremony during the period of mourning. 

 The mourner was obliged to dwell in an unplastered earth hut for two 

 years. After the sacrifice in the commencement of the third year, the 

 ground of his cot was blackened, and the walls were whitened, — a 

 rite simply expressed by the compound yu ngo J&& 31. * In the same 

 chapter of the "Book of Rites" in which this practice is mentioned, 

 the same word ngo occurs in a somewhat different usage. The dwell- 

 ing specially erected for the mourner is styled ngo shi H H?, a term ex- 

 plained as "a hut made of unburnt bricks or earth pise" and not plas- 

 tered," and used in the Li ki four times. The mourner was compelled 

 to divest himself of all comfort, and to relapse into the most primitive 

 habitation of early times. The term ngo shi, accordingly, means liter- 

 ally "earth house;" and during the archaic period, ngo designated 

 "loam, mud, or clay fit for building-purposes." Simultaneously, 

 however, it was applied also to chalk or limestone, denoting the process 

 of coating a coarse wall with a layer of white. In this sense it is utilized 

 also by Chuang-tse in regard to the whitening of one's nose. 2 Since 

 the word ngo, which is still defined by the Shuo wen as "white plaster," 

 originally referred to clay and chalk at the same time, the early Chinese 

 do not seem to have clearly discriminated between the two substances. 

 The term pai ngo, which adopted the meaning "kaolin" in the post- 

 Christian era, is still used to convey the notion of "chalk," while a 

 stricter terminology formulates for the latter such compounds as shi 

 ngo 35 M ("stone clay"), ngo hui 3E 2£ ("clay lime"), or pai Vu fen 

 U ± & ("white earth powder"). 3 



One point stands out clearly, — that in the archaic period the word 

 ngo signified "loam and chalk used in building," and was appropriate 

 to the activity of the mason, but that it neither denoted potter's clay 

 nor had any relation whatever to the work of the potter. The main 

 point to be borne in mind is, that there is no reference to "white clay" 

 (pai ngo) in any authentic document of the Han period, — a fact thor- 

 oughly corroborated by archaeological evidence. The "white clay," 



1 Li ki, ed. Couvreur, Vol. II, p. 240; translation of Legge, Vol. II, p. 192. 



1 Ch. 24, § 5; see the edition of L. Wieger, Taoisme, Vol. II, p. 420. It is 

 notable that the stage-fool still appears in China with his nose whitened; and the 

 figure of an actor represented by a T'ang clay statuette in the Museum collection 

 is thus characterized. 



1 See F. de Mely, Lapidaires chinois, p. 99; F. Porter Smith, Contributions 

 towards the Materia Medica of China, p. 58. 



