Some Ch'ang-sha CeramicsAuthor(s): George LeeSource: Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, Vol. 18 (1964), pp. 62-63Published by: University of Hawai'i Press for the Asia SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20067072 .

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Some Ch'ang-sha Ceramics

George Lee

Yale University Art Gallery

New Haven, Connecticut

In the spring of 1939, the Yale Art Gallery held an exhibition of Ch'ang-sha material, lent

by John Hadley Cox.1 Many of the objects shown at that time have, over the years, entered the

permanent collection of the Gallery, thanks to

the generosity of Mr. Cox and other donors. The

intervention of the war, and other misfortunes,

prevented John Hadley Cox from any definitive

publication of the material he accumulated in

Ch'ang-sha in the 193 O's. This small note is of

fered to help forestall further overshadowing of his pioneering work by the extensive new finds

on the Asian mainland.

John Hadley Cox spent the years 1936 and 1937 as a member of the teaching staff of Yale

in-China. He soon heard of, and developed an

interest in, the antiquities being unearthed by construction work in the vicinity of Ch'ang-sha.

On February 22, 1936, Cox actually saw mater

ial coming from a grave in the low hills roughly two miles northeast of the North Gate of Ch'ang sha. To cite his own words:2

After more than an hour's slow digging in the hard red Hunan clay one of the men's

picks struck an object at a depth of about

six feet below the surface level. Using a

bamboo stick to clear away the soil there

were successively revealed a gracefully

shaped pillow of bluish - white porcelain (similar in shape to the early Egyptian pil

lows of alabaster and wood), five small cel

adons, six large-headed iron coffin-nails, and

a tall earthenware ceremonial urn standing

upright at the western end of the grave.

Cox also mentions the recovery of two coins in

the excavation of this grave.

The pillow and celadons can be identified by the description above and by the Gallery cata

logue cards. Four of the five celadons, in reality smallish jars, are in the Yale collection.

The height of the pillow3 varies between 4l/z and 4% inches, the irregularity being easily vis

ible in the photograph (Fig. 1). Made of a por cellaneous clay of sugary white texture and color, the piece is covered with a pale blue glaze which assumes a green tint where thick. The glaze has

a light irregular crackle, and many of these fis

sures have been invaded by the reddish soil. There

seems no reason to consider the piece other than

local chying-pai ware.

The pillow does, however, have three interest

ing elements of base construction. First, a bot

tom has been luted on to the hollow base. Second, this bottom has been cut with two separated, semi-circular holes, each about three quarters of

an inch in diameter, to improve air circulation

during firing. And last, the interior of the hol

low base has been glazed. The two trefoils, cut

from the base and visible in figure 1, also helped avoid the trapping of unusual amounts of heat

during the firing.

There have been, to the best of my knowledge, no pillows of this type reported from China. Its

general proportions, however, remind one of a

stone pillow in the Royal Ontario Museum, pub lished by Miss Helen Fernald,4 and attributed to late T'ang or the tenth century.

62

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Fig. 1. Pillo?v, Ch'ing-pai Ware, Sung Dynasty. Yale Uni

versity Art Gallery, John Hadley Cox Collection, 1940.371. Height 41/2 inches; width 6y8 inches.

The four celadon jars, of which one is illus trated (Fig. 2), vary substantially in clay han

dling and glaze, but three are precisely 2 7/16

inches in height. One jar has, for example, a

string cut base, two others roughly hollowed

bases, and the last shows some pretension towards

a foot rim. The glaze colors run from an olive

green through to buff tan. The piece illustrated'

is perhaps the most satisfying aesthetically of

the group with a soft toned green glaze over a

light grey body clay. A network of light tan crackle cover the glaze surface, and many of

these fissures show the adhesion of the reddish

soil or the past chemical action of that soil.

Fig. 2. Jar, Celadon Ware, Sung Dynasty. Yale University Art Gallery, John Hadley Cox Collection, 1940.372b.

Height 2 7/16 inches; width 32A inches.

The Gallery also possesses two coins which,

tissue wrapped in one of the jars, were labelled

"found in celadon jar". One can be read chou

t'ung yuan pao, a coin of the Posterior Chou

dynasty, and attributed by Nakahashi to the year 952/ The other, hsien pying yuan pao, is a Sung coin of 993.7 While numismatic evidence is at

best valid in only one direction (i.e., the grave is

not earlier than 993), the presence of the Poster

ior Chou dynasty coin suggests that Cox saw, on

February 22, 1936, the opening of a burial close

to the transitional years between the tenth and

eleventh centuries.

NOTES

1. Gallery of Fine Arts, Yale University, An Exhibition of Chi nese Antiquities from Ch'ang-sha, lent by John Hadley Cox,

March 26 to May 7, 1939, 15 pp., 9 figs.

2. The quotation cited here is from a typed copy of a publicity release in the Gallery files. An emasculated version of this

material appeared in the Yale Alumni Weekly, vol. II, no. 17

(April 21, 1939), 9.

3. Yale University Art Gallery. 1940.371.

4. Fernald, Helen E., Chinese Mortuary Pillows in the Royal Ontario Museum, reprinted from the Far Eastern Ceramic

Bulletin, IV, 1 (March 1952), Fig. 2.

5. Yale University Art Gallery. 1940.372 b.

6. Nakahashi Kikusen, comp., Shinsen Kosen Taikan, newly re vised 1959, 113. See also Li Tso-hsien, Ku Ch'?an Hui, reprint of 1864, li, IX, 3-4.

7. Nakahashi, op. cit., 119; Li, op. cit., li, X, 4.

63

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