Chinese Art. Stephen W. Bushell

Dynasty

      The Yuan Dynasty (1280–1367) was established by Kublai Khan (1215–1294) a grandson of the great Mongol warrior, Genghis Khan. The Mongols annexed the Uigur Turks and destroyed the Tangut kingdom, swept over Turkestan, Persia, and the steppes beyond, ravaged Russia and Hungary, and even threatened the existence of Western Europe. China was completely overrun by nomad horsemen, its finances ruined by issues of an irredeemable paper currency, and its cities handed over to alien governors called darughas. A Chinese contemporary writer describes the ruin of the porcelain industry at Ching-tê Chên at this time by exorbitant official taxation, so that the potters were driven away from the old imperial manufactory there, to start new kilns in other parts of the province of Kiangsi.

      Marco Polo is astonished at the riches and magnificence of the great Khan, who was really a ruler of exceptional power and made good use of his Chinese conquests. But the culture which surprised the Venetian traveller was pre-Mongolian, and its growth was due mainly to Chinese hands. Even the wonderful cane palace of Marco Polo was actually the old summer residence of the Sung emperors at Kaifeng Fu, in the province of Honan, which was dismantled and carried away piece by piece to be built up again in the park of the new Mongolian capital of Shangtu, outside the Great Wall of China.

      The Mongolian era is responsible for some of the remarkable similarities that have been noticed in industrial art work of Western and Eastern Asia, which were then for the first time under the rule of the same house. Hulagu Khan is said to have brought a hundred families of Chinese artisans and engineers to Persia about 1256; and similarly, the earliest painted porcelain of China is decorated with panels of Arabic script pencilled in the midst of floral scrolls, strongly suggestive of Persian influence.

      Ming Dynasty

      The Mongols were driven out of China to the north of the Gobi Desert in 1368, in which year the Ming Dynasty was founded by a young bonze named Chu Yuan-chang. They raided the borders for some time, and even carried off one of the Chinese emperors in 1449, who, however, was liberated eight years later, to resume his reign under the new title of T’ien Shun, as may be seen in the accompanying list. This is noticeable as being the only change of nien-hao (reign name) during the last two dynasties, whereas in previous lines changes were very frequent.

      The early Ming emperors kept up communication with the West by sea, and the reigns of Yung Lo (Zhu Di) (1360–1424) and Hsüan Te are especially distinguished by the career of a famous eunuch admiral, who went in command of armed ships to India, Ceylon, and Arabia, down the African coast to Magadoxu, and up the Red Sea as far as Jiddah, the sea-port of Mecca. Celadon porcelain (ch’ing tz’u) is included in the list of articles taken to Mecca in the reign of Hsüan Tê (1426–35), and it was perhaps one of these expeditions that brought the celadon vases sent by the Sultan of Egypt in 1487 to Lorenzo de Medici. In the next century, Portuguese and Spanish ships appeared for the first time in these seas and Chinese ships were seen no more.

      Giulio Aleni (1582–1649), Complete Map of All Nations, c.1620.

      Paper. British Museum, London.

      Chronology

      Qing Dynasty

      The Qing Dynasty also known as the Manchu Dynasty, was the last ruling dynasty of China from 1644 to 1912. Starting in 1644 it expanded into China proper and its surrounding territories, establishing the Empire of the Great Qing. During its reign, the Qing Dynasty became highly integrated with Chinese culture.

      However, its military power weakened during the 1800s, and faced with international pressure, massive rebellions and defeats in wars, the Qing Dynasty declined after the mid-19th century. The collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912 brought an end to over 2,000 years of imperial China and began an extended period of instability of warlord factionalism

      Map of China.

      Wang I-p’eng (15th c.), Inscription on Wu Chen’s Manual of Ink Bamboo, 15th c.

      Album leaf, ink on paper, 38 × 53.1 cm.

      National Palace Museum, Taipei.

      I. Architecture

      Juyong Pass, 15th c.

      50 km northwest of Peking.

      Qi Nian Dian (Altar of Prayer for Grain)

      Dragon Phoenix caisson, 1420. Wood. Peking.

      China, in every epoch of its history, and for all its edifices, civil or religious, public or private, has kept to a single architectural model. Even when new types have been introduced from the west under the influence of Buddhism and Mohammedanism, the lines have become gradually toned down and conformed to his own standard by the levelling hands of the Chinese mason. It is a cardinal rule in Chinese geomancy that every important building must face the south, and the uniform orientation resulting from this adds to the general impression of monotony.

      1. – Roof

      The most general model of Chinese buildings is the t’ing. This consists essentially of a massive roof with recurved edges resting upon short columns. The curvilinear tilting of the corners of the roof has been supposed to be a survival from the days of tent dwellers, who used to hang the corners of their canvas pavilions on spears; but this is carrying it back to a very dim antiquity, as we have no records of the Chinese except as a settled agricultural people.

      The roof is the principal feature of the building, and gives to it its qualities of grandeur or simplicity, of strength or grace. To vary its aspect, the architect is induced occasionally to double, or even to triple it. This preponderance of a part usually sacrificed in Western architecture is justified by the smaller vertical elevation of the plan, and the architect devotes every attention to the decoration of the roof by the addition of antefixal ornaments, and by covering it with glazed tiles of brilliant colour, so as to concentrate the eye upon it.

      The dragons and phoenixes posed on the crest of the roof, the grotesque animals perched in lines upon the eaves, and the yellow, green and blue tiles which cover it are not chosen at random, but after strict sumptuary laws, so that they may denote the rank of the owner of a house or indicate the imperial foundation of a temple.

      The great weight of the roof necessitates the multiple employment of the column, which is assigned a function of the first importance. The columns are made of wood; the shaft is generally cylindrical, occasionally polyhedral, never channelled; the capital is only a kind of console, squared at the ends, or shaped into dragon’s heads; the pedestal is a square block of stone chiselled at the top into a circular base on which the shaft is posed. The pedestal, according to rule, ought not to be higher than the width of the column, and the shaft not more than ten times longer than its diameter. Large trunks of the white cedar (Persea nanmu) from the province of Sichuan are floated down the Yangtze river to be brought to Peking to be used as columns for the palaces and large temples.

      The cedar is the tallest and straightest of Chinese trees. The grain improves by age, and the wood gradually acquires a dead-leaf brown tint while it preserves its aromatic qualities, so that the superb columns of the sacrificial temple of the Emperor Yung Lo, which date from the early part of the fifteenth century, still exhale a vague perfume.

      The Chinaberry (nanmu wood) pillars in the Ling’en Hall of Changling, 1450–1500. The Royal Mausoleum of Ming.

      Changling, North-West of Peking.

      Mufu (Mu family mansion), 13th-14 th c.

      Lijiang old town. Lijiang.

      Small figures on the ends of roofs