400 REVIEWS

works such as the Hou Han shu or the Wen century onward is the justification for the
hsiiari). treatment he adopted. It should be emphasized
The book is supported by 53 half-tone plates ; that there is more than enough material
it is printed with the insertion of Chinese already, and to have attempted even a super-
characters in situ, for text, footnotes and ficial survey of the early use of lacquer would
bibliography ; and readers can only be grateful have resulted in a volume about twice the size.
for so lavish a production. Is it nonetheless After a brief chapter on the nature of
churlish to express regret that, despite the lacquer and the basic processes involved in
provision of ' the full cost ' of publication by handling it, the early lacquer wares down to
the School of Oriental and African Studies, the the end of the Sung dynasty are discussed in
book is priced beyond the range of most general terms using a small number of key
university teaching officers' pockets ? pieces, such as the Shang fragments from the
MICHAEL LOEWE excavations in 1973 at T'ai-hsi-ts'un, the shell
inlaid traces at An-yang and the varied pieces
from the Ma-wang-tui find. In connexion
Sir HARRY GARNER : Chinese lacquer. with the technical details discussed in this
(The Arts of the East.) 285 pp. 9 pis. chapter it would have been helpful if the
London: FaberandFaber, 1979. £20. photograph used for plate 14 could have been j
blown up as large as possible, as the incised
When over 25 years ago the late Sir Harry designs referred to are not really visible. The
Gamer retired from the Civil Service, he early lacquers having been thus disposed of
entered upon an entirely new career as a the real meat of the subject is approached in
historian of Chinese decorative art. His con- a chapter devoted to a critical assessment of
tributions in this field were outstanding. In the literature in Chinese, which is more exten-
addition to numerous scholarly articles he sive than is generally believed. This is a
completed three full-length studies on im- valuable section and one which no student
portant aspects of the arts of China. The first should ignore, as a number of accepted tradi-
was Oriental blue and white, in 1954, reprinted
with a new extended introduction in 1970, a tions have been shown to be wholly without
study based on his pre-war interest in Chinese foundation, of which one of the most important
blue and white porcelain, the second was is that there is no evidence to support the
Chinese and Japanese cloisonne enamels in widely held view that there was a lacquer
1962, in which his knowledge of metallurgy factory in Peking in the reign of Yung-lo, at
and metal technology gave him an unusual the beginning of the fifteenth century. Of
advantage over most art historians. Finally great importance too are the comments on the
the present posthumously published study of glaring errors made by Kao Lien in Tsung-
lacquer which, like his earlier publications sheng pa-chien of 1591, although this text is
promises to be a standard work, indispensable not without its uses. The chapter is supple-
to students in the field of Chinese art history. mented by an annotated bibliography of the
Thefinalwork, completed a matter of weeks Chinese texts, which is an invaluable addition
before his death, is the fruit of both scientific to a volume the author of which breaks so
and art historical research reaching back over much new ground.
a period of about 20 years, during the course On the basis of this thorough examination
of which he built up for his work an extremely of the texts and of meticulous technical
interesting and valuable collection of Chinese analysis of the material, Garner then proceeds
lacquers, together with a certain number of to the study of the later lacquers themselves,
Ryukyu and Japanese examples in the beginning with the origins of carved and
techniques used first by the Chinese. When marbled lacquer, and the \'exed question of
his research had been completed, he and Ladv- what is meant by the Chinese term hsi-p'i,
Garner gave the collection to the nation, and which in the texts is variously written )|1 (J^,
it is now divided equally between the British Jjt 2$L a n ( l B Jj[- Argument has raged
Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, among the Chinese for some centuries over
so that through their generosity this country what was really meant, and many suggestions
now has the most important and compre- have been made, some as entertaining as they
hensive holdings of Chinese lacquers in the are fantastic. One suggestion, for instance,
world. by a late fifteenth-century writer was that the
In his attack on this difficult and complex character p'i $fc ' should be interpreted as
subject, Garner has concentrated primarily on " navel " and that the characters hsi-p'i refer
the lacquers of the later centuries from the to the pattern round the navel of a rhinoceros,
Yuan dynasty onward. Ho is careful to point which takes the form of two facing t'ao-t'ieh
out in his introduction that something has to •i§ ^ masks, a pattern that is claimed to
be said about the earlier wares since many of occur in the lacquer decoration'. Such
the types originated long before Yuan, but romantic nonsense rightly rejected, the objects
that no Western writer has attempted to cover themselves have been examined, and the pro-
these systematically. He lays stress on the posal is put forward that because of all the
fact that had any attempt been made in the confusion the term hsi-p'i should be dispensed
past to do so, considerable revision would now with and the descriptive phrases ' carved
be necessary in the light of Chinese archaeolo- marbled lacquer ' and ' flat marbled lacquer '
gical work. In his opinion the time is not ripe be used instead. Admittedly these phrases are
for such an account, and this together with the both rather unwieldy, but they do precisely
fact that the great mass of lacquers surviving
above ground date from about the fourteenth describe the two types which have been
 REVIEWS 401
lumped together under the Chinese term. The have begun in about the middle of the four-
first type, earlier in date than the latter, is teenth century. The research on this particular
well known in Japan under the term guri, one type lead Garner to the consideration of Korean
meaning of which is ' spiral', a feature of the examples of the technique, and to study briefly
decoration of some of the Chinese examples, the influences operating here between China
but by no means all, and Garner suggests that and Korea, both technical and stylistic.
its use should be confined to the carved type Reference is also made to the spread of the
with multi-coloured layers in black, red and technique to Ryukyu, and he comments on
yellow which are carved in early examples with the fact that in Ryukyu there is use of a red
V-shaped grooves. The flat marbled lacquers ground, which was apparentl}' disliked and not
appear not to have been made before the used by the Chinese.
sixteenth century and are not common. The There are brief chapters on painted lacquer,
technique is explained quite clearly thus: which does not figure largely in the later
' They were made by building a pattern in wares, and on Coromandel lacquer. The term
raised moulded lacquer composition and then Coromandel surprisingly only occurs for the
applying to it successive layers of different first time in 1913, in the catalogue of an
colours in the same way as in the carved wares. exhibition of Chinese art held in Manchester
Finally the whole surface was ground level, City Art Gallery. The final chapter, also quite
leaving a pattern similar to that of the original short, is concerned with South-East Asian
built-up pattern '. Many of these designs are material.
very irregular and are often referred to as Some of the groundwork for this monograph
' rhinoceros skin ' pattern. was published in detailed studies in a number
A number of styles of carved lacquer are of journals, so that much has, with advantage,
distinguished and a regional one identified in been omitted ; it would make difficult reading
the sixteenth century as being Yiinnanese. In for the non-specialist. Although in detail some
writing of the production of lacquer in the experts may disagree with statements made,
Ch'ing period, it is interesting to notice that the picture of the later lacquer is admirably
Gamer is extremely reluctant to assign any presented. The illustration, as usual with
carved examples of really fine, ' imperial' Garner, is carefully chosen and generally of
quality to either the K'ang-hsi or Yung-cheng admirable quality; inevitably the reprints
periods, although there are plenty of pieces of from Chinese journals are poor. However the
the Ch'ien-lung period, despite the fact that colour plates, especially the details, are ex-
workshops were set up in the Forbidden City cellent. It is rather unfortunate that plate 43
in or even before 1680 for the manufacture of has been printed sideways with the top of the
a wide range of artifacts in various media. dish towards the right. Printed on art paper
Recent research suggests that the accommoda- throughout (which adds something to the
tion was too limited to permit the storage of weight), the illustration is incorporated into
this kind of material for the long period the text, an innovation in this monograph
necessary for its manufacture. In any case the series that some people may deplore. However
climate of Peking is not very favourable to a the arrangement has great advantages in a
material which requires a degree of humidity subject such as this which can best be handled
to be fairly constant throughout the processes on the basis of the techniques.
involved. It would thus be interesting to This final monograph is an impressive
know under what system the great number of example of the inexorable logic of the scientific
Ch'ien-lung lacquers were made. mind married to a deep appreciation of the
In the following two chapters the technique arts, and it is a crowning achievement of a
known as ch'iang-chin >|fr - ^ , and the related man remarkable for his tireless application to
'filled-inlacquer ' are examined, and this leads one of the most difficult areas in the applied
to an assessment of the Ryukyu lacquers of arts.
the fifteenth century which derived directly MARGARET MEDLEY
from the Chinese ones of the fourteenth and
early fifteenth centuries. During the fifteenth
century the Chinese developed the filled-in J. M. ADDIS : Chinese porcelain from the
type. The ch'iang-chin type continued, but Addis Collection: twenty-two pieces of
with a change in style from the earlier, rather Chinqtehchen porcelain presented to the
bold bird and flower designs to pictorial scenes,
often on a small scale, very similar to those British Museum. 90 pp. London:
being produced in the contemporary^ blue and British Museum Publications Limited,
white porcelain. These chapters are very 1979. £25.
closely argued and the conclusions are clear,
This
while an admirable caution is observed with three importantrecent book by Sir John Addis achieves
regard to dating. This also comes out particu- complete excavation objects. In the absence of
larly well in the following chapter on the sites at Chingtehchen, of the thirty odd kiln-
mother-of-pearl lacquers, so often referred to precisely dated Sung. Yuan or indeed of many
and Early Ming
as laque burgaute. There is a notable reluctance, tombs anywhere in China, it follows on from
largely on technical grounds, to allow the well- his Chinese ceramics from datable tombs in
known fragment of mother-of-pearl lacquer establishing a convincingly argued chronology
from the Tatu excavation, of a building that for late Yuan and early Ming porcelain.
was demolished to make way for the new city Secondly, as Douglas Barrett points out in his
of Peking, a date earlier than the fifteenth foreword, the collection acts as a unique and
century, although the technique is known to valuable addition to the British Museum's