July, 1912. Chinese Pottery. 21 



mentioned by Jagor is most probably a piece of celadon pottery. 

 Prof. Eduard Seler has been good enough to inform us that it is not 

 preserved in the Berlin Museum, but he describes a similar piece extant 

 there, a fragment of a plate or a flat bowl found by Dr. Schetelig in a 

 cave of Caramuan, Luzon, on the Philippines. "The material," 

 Prof. Seler says, "is a red-burnt hard clay including small white bits 

 of what is apparently calcareous matter. The well-known salad-green 

 glaze exhibiting numerous fine crackles covers the entire surface except 

 the circular foot. On the lower face, the marks of the potter's wheel 

 are visible. On the glazed surface shallow grooves are radially ar- 

 ranged." This description, beyond any doubt, refers to a specimen of 

 celadon pottery of the Sung period, and I am especially interested in 

 the fact that it is hard, red-burnt stoneware, and not porcelain. The 

 former authors always spoke of celadon porcelains exclusively, an 

 error first refuted by Captain F. Brinkley, 1 who justly says that all 

 the choice celadons of the Sung, Yuan, and even the Ming dynasties 

 were stoneware, showing considerable variation in respect to fineness 

 of pate and thinness of biscuit, but never becoming true translucid 

 porcelain. The majority of celadon pieces in the Sung period seem to 

 have been stoneware, while the porcelain specimens increase during the 



from India were settled there, married to native women and engaged in reading 

 their sacred books. When they are sick, says the Chinese report, they make a vow 

 to be buried by the birds; under chants and dances, they are conducted outside of 

 the town, and there are birds who devour them. The remaining bones are calcined 

 and enclosed in a jar which is flung into the sea. When they are not eaten by the 

 birds, they are placed in a basket. As regards burial by fire, it consists in leaping 

 into a fire. The ashes are gathered in a vase which is interred, and to which sacrifices 

 are offered without limit of time. The inference could be drawn from this passage 

 that the practice of burial in jars is derived from India. "Among the tribes of the 

 Hindukush," reports W. Crooke (Things Indian, p. 128), "cremation used to be 

 the common form of burial, the ashes being collected in rude wooden boxes or in 

 earthen jars and buried." This was the case also in the funerary rites of ancient 

 India (W. Caland, Die altindischen Todten- und Bestattungsgebrauche, pp. 104, 

 107, 108) when the bones after cremation were gathered in an urn; according to one 

 rite, the bones collected in an earthenware bowl were sprinkled with water, the bowl 

 was wrapped up in a dress made from Kuca grass and inserted in another pottery 

 vessel which was interred in a forest, or near the root of a tree or in a clean place in a 

 durable relic-shrine. Among the Nayars or Nairs of Malabar, the pieces of unburnt 

 bones are placed in an earthen pot which has been sun-dried (not burnt by fire in the 

 usual way) ; the pot is covered up with a piece of new cloth, and all following the 

 eldest, who carries it, proceed to the nearest river (it must be running water), which 

 receives the remains of the dead (E. Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern 

 India, p. 215, Madras, 1906). The latter practice offers a parallel to the burying 

 of the jar in the sea, as related above in regard to Tun-sun. Nowadays, the bones 

 after cremation are gathered on a gold, silver, or copper plate in Cambodja (A. 

 Leclere, Cambodge: La cremation et les rites funeYaires, pp. 76, 82, Hanoi, 1906). 

 On jar-burial on the Liu-kiu Islands compare the interesting article of M. Haber- 

 landt, t)ber eine Graburne von den Liukiu-Inseln (Mitleilungen der Anthropol. 

 Gesellschaft in Wien, Vol. XXIII, 1893, pp. 39-42); the specimen figured is doubtless 

 a Chinese production as used for the burial of the ashes of a Buddhist monk. 



1 China, Keramic Art, p. 34 (London, 1904). 



