CHINA ARQUEOLOGIA golden-age-chinese-archayeolog

167
Mi se ware pan dish
Height 6.1 (27s), diam. 23.8 (9 3 /s), diam. of foot
i74(6 7 A)
Tang Dynasty, ninth century CE
From the pagoda of the Famen Monastery at Fufeng,
Shaanxi Province
Famensi Museum, Fufeng, Shaanxi Province
Among sixteen ceramic vessels excavated from the
middle chamber of the crypt beneath the Famen
Monastery pagoda, no fewer than thirteen were
mi se ("secret color") fine stoneware. Most of them
were contained in a lacquered wooden box, placed
beneath the large silver censer immediately in front
of the doors leading to the third and innermost
chamber. 1 They had been dedicated in 873 by Emperor
Yizong, and are recorded on stone tablets as
follows: "Mi se ci ["porcelain"] 2 bowls: seven items,
two with silver banded rims; mi se ci pan dishes and
diezi: six items." The ceramics actually found comprise
these seven bowls and six dishes, together
with a single octagonal fluted bottle, similar to one
excavated in the 19505 from a tomb dated 8/i, 3 and
two pieces of white stoneware. The two bowls with
silver rims, glazed a yellowish green, are coated on
the outside with black lacquer inlaid in gold and
silver with medallions of birds, flowers, and
scrolling foliage. 4 The other bowls are plain, with
a grayish huqing (lake green) glaze of the finest
quality.
Celebrated in literature ever since the ninth
century as mi se, the ware's exact nature had long
defied precise identification; the correspondence
between the inventory stele and the ceramics recovered
from the pagoda's foundation deposit has
resolved that question. The mi se pieces were fired
in a "dragon" kiln (a long kiln built up a slope)
in a strongly reducing atmosphere, in which the
relatively high levels of ferrous oxide and titanium
oxide, around 2.5 percent, produced both the fine
gray-green and the yellowish green glazes. 5
The pan shown here, 6 with a five-lobed rim and
sides divided by five short straight lines, derives
from a silverware shape, as do the bowls, dishes,
and the octagonal bottle. (Metalworking techniques
similarly inform the inlay of the ceramic silverbanded
bowls.) The clay paste forming the body
had been refined to the point where it contained
no sand particles, and the glaze has only a very few
tiny gas bubbles. On the base, twenty-four exceedingly
slender spur marks (four of them somewhat
larger than the others), form a circle on the base;
one of the other pan dishes shows two concentric
482 | EARLY IMPERIAL CHINA