PLATE CXXVII.
Amongst the specimens furnished by the Great Exhibition of the ingenuity with which the natives of theCelestial Empire have in times past cultivated the useful and ornamental arts, few were more interesting thanthose which form the subject of our present Plate; for the opportunity of inspecting which the public wereindebted to the enterprise of J. Rutherford Alcock, Esq., Her Majesty’s Consul at Shanghai . The objects inquestion formed a portion of the valuable illustrations of Chinese industry collected by M. de Montigny, theFrench Consul at the abovenamed port, who was warmly assisted in his scientific researches by the RomanCatholic Missionaries in the interior of China .
Unlike most of the processes in use in that country, the practice of enamelling, although now for the mostpart fallen into desuetude, appears to be referable to a comparatively modem date. We learn from a documentpublished by M. Pauthier in his history of China, * that under the reign of Thai-wou-ti, of the dynasty ofWei, which lasted from a.d. 422 to 451 , a merchant of the country of the great Youe-tclii, or Scythians , cameto the court of that Emperor, and proposed to manufacture in China those various-coloured glasses which hadbeen previously imported from western countries, and for which excessive prices had been paid. In pursuanceof his instructions investigations were made in the mountains, and the necessary materials for the manufacturewere ultimately discovered. This merchant succeeded in making coloured glass of the greatest beauty, andfrom his time the price of such materials diminished considerably in China . It has been ingeniously concludedby M. Labartef that the people referred to as Scythians were no other than the inhabitants of Persia .
However popular such decorative substances as coloured glasses may have been, we have no direct evidenceof the use of vitrified materials as enamel pastes, until nearly one thousand years subsequent to the above-named period. Numerous specimens exist, resembling in their general characteristics the objects we nowengrave, and possessing internal evidence of chronological identity with a few examples, which bear inscriptionsby which the date of their fabrication may be ascertained with comparative precision. It appears highlyprobable that the finest of such objects were executed during the Ming dinasty; since the interesting specimenin the collection of Mr. A. W. Franks bears date from a.d. 1426 to 1436 , and that of M. Debruo-e Dumesnilalso furnishes indications of having been executed in the King-tai period of the above-named dynasty;—corresponding with the years a.d. 1450 to 1457 .
So far as we are aware, the art of fabricating vessels such as those exhibited by Mr. Alcock is com-pletely extinct, and it is therefore difficult to describe the precise method by which they have been executed.
It is, however, apparent that threads or ribbons of metal, probably copper, have been bent into fancifulpatterns in the interior of a hollow mould, and the compartments formed by such bands have been fillednp with enamels in powder, in a manner precisely similar to that adopted by the Greeks of the LowerEmpire, and described in our first notice of the art of enamelling, Plate LI. The whole being fusedtogether, the external mould was removed, and the number of portions requisite to make up the entirevessel having been completed, they were doubtless put together by soldering, and the introduction of morereadily fusible enamels. The singular coincidence between the peculiar tints and textures of the vitrified pastes
* “ Chine, ou Description de ce vaste Empire/-’ page 237.
f “Description dcs Objets d’Art, qui composent la Collection Debruge Dumesnil, par Jules Labartc,” page 392.