POSTSCRIPT 

 By Berthold Laufer 



At the request of Mr. Cole I take the liberty to append a few notes 

 on the subject of Chinese pottery in the Philippine Islands. From 

 the very interesting information furnished by Mr. Cole on the subject, 

 it becomes evident that two well-defined periods in the trade of Chinese 

 pottery to the Islands must be distinguished. The one is constituted 

 by the burial pottery discovered in caves, the other is marked by the 

 numerous specimens still found in the possession of families and, 

 according to tradition, transmitted as heirlooms through many genera- 

 tions. Let us state at the outset that from the viewpoint of the Chinese 

 field of research a plausible guess may be hazarded as to what these 

 two periods are, — the mortuary finds roughly corresponding to the 

 period of the Chinese Sung dynasty (960-1278 a. d.), and the surface 

 finds to that of the Ming dynasty (1368-1643). 1 By this division in 

 time I do not mean to draw a hard and fast line for the classification of 

 this pottery, but merely to lay down a working hypothesis as the basis 

 from which to attack the problem that will remain for future investiga- 

 tion. There is the possibility also that early Ming pieces are to be 

 found in the graves or caves and, on the other hand, the existence of 

 Sung and After-Ming specimens, say of the seventeenth and eighteenth 

 centuries, in the hands of the natives will no doubt be established with 

 the advance of search and research. But these two cases, if they will 

 prove, will surely remain the exceptions, while the formula as expressed 

 above carries the calculation of the greatest probability. 



It is well known that during the middle ages a lively export trade in 

 pottery took place from China into the regions of the Malayan Archi- 

 pelago, India, Persia, Egypt, the east coast of Africa, and Morocco. 

 Quite a number of ancient specimens of China ware have been discovered 

 in all those countries and wandered into collections of Europe. The 

 curiosity of investigators was early stimulated in this subject, and to 

 A. B. Meyer, Karabacek, Hirth, A. R. Hein, F. Brinkley and others, 

 we owe contributions to this question from the ceramic and trade - 



1 Certainly I have here in mind only those specimens prized by the natives as 

 heirlooms and looked upon by them as old. There is assuredly any quantity of 

 modern Chinese crockery and porcelain spread over the Philippines, which, however, 

 is of no account and not the object of legends and worship on the part of the natives. 



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