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Here are three different fluted ewers from medieval China which exemplify Longquan-type celadon. This style of porcelain (or stoneware, if you ascribe to a purely western methodology of ceramics terminology) was abundantly produced in the kilns of Zhejian and Fujian from about 950 AD to 1550 AD. The characteristic blue-green and gray-green colors are the result of iron oxide glazes fired at temperatures around 1250C in a reducing atmosphere (which is to say the oxygen-deficient atmosphere of the dragon kilns where they were made).
Of course the real point of this post is to appreciate the beauty of these ancient ewers. I particularly like fluted pieces because the elegant vertical lines go so very well with the simple round melon/pumpkin shapes. Likewise, the understated green glaze color (along with the fleabites and brown patches of irregular glaze) are particularly suited to this sort of pot. They look like they grew on a magical vine in some immortal’s secret garden! Even the texture–which is perfectly smooth and glossy, yet also has appealing pits, bumps, and micropatterns–seems strangely alive.
These three ewers are arranged from oldest (top) to most recently produced (bottom). The top piece is from the Northern Song Dynasty when the Song emperor controlled both the north and south of China. The middle piece is from the southern Song (when the imperial capital moved to Hangzhou a city not so far from Longquan which was the center of these sorts of crafts).
The last piece is a Yuan piece from the era of Mongol hegemony and seems to have a different feel from the other pieces (so much so, that it is the most questionable of all of the pieces). Yet its gorgeous shape and color mean I must include it. As a final note, it is worth mentioning that part of the beauty of these works is in their utility and strength. They were all built robustly enough that they are here in pristine shape after a thousand tumultuous years of Chinese history. All of them have highly functional and thermodynamically efficient designs which, in the end, are not so different from the modern machine-made English teapot which I use every day. Indeed, considering where tea and porcelain originated, they are all ancestors of my teapot
OK! Over the last dozen years, we have suffered through lots of rats, oxen, and yang-animals, but we have finally busted through to a GRRRRreat year! Happy Lunar New Year 4719–the year of the Water Tiger! Tigers are pretty obviously the best option in the Chinese Zodiac (unless you somehow have a fixation on dragons, which, you know, don’t actually exist…unlike certain stripey & charismatic giant land predators I could name). Of course the question of how much longer the mighty cats will continue to exist in the poacher-filled forests of our used-up planet is a dark question which we will leave for a subsequent post (but which will quietly haunt us as we drive around our land of concrete and garbage). For right now, though, let’s bask in the warm & gentle (and false) glow of friendly horoscope predictions! According to some random website site I found a great oracle of profound wisdom, this tiger year is destined to be a very prosperous year! Also, as in other tiger years, you are extremely likely to personally accomplish noteworthy feats of strength, valor, and exorcism! Usually I would make a joke about casting out evil spirits and malicious sorcery, but not in 2022 er…4719. Even as I write this, I am burning joss sticks, singing Taoist spells, and wearing lucky colors. Let’s cast some of this evil out of the land, for real!
Speaking of lucky colors, the perspicacious sages of ancient China also compiled a handy list of fortunate and auspicious colors for you to wear during this water tiger year. Here is what you should wear (depending on your own horoscope animal of course).
- Rat: red and blue
- Ox: red and yellow
- Tiger: orange, black, and blue
- Rabbit: green, purple and orange
- Dragon: yellow and white
- Snake: tangerine, cyan, and silver
- Horse: green, blue and red
- Goat: bright yellow
- Monkey: white and baby blue
- Rooster: yellow
- Dog: yellow, black and grey
- Pig: yellow, green and black
I guess I had better come up with some orange, black, and blue ensembles: this is supposed to be a lucky year for romance (although, frankly, that combination sounds less like a tiger swimming through a river and more like somebody beat up a crossing guard). This other website says tigers should just wear red, which sounds like better advice (chromatically if not sartorially). The other thing this second website says is that we should buy kumquat trees to decorate our houses. Hmm, it sounds like “big kumquat” might have bribed whoever wrote this.
You can (and should) look up more of these fun and funny New Years suggestions, but right now I am going to go eat some dumplings and citrus fruits. I will write some real posts about tigers later this week. Happy New Year! (In the spirit of Yuan Duan This article was a bit tongue-in-cheek but I was serious about exorcising evil)
虎年大吉! We are going to have a great tiger year and reclaim our lives!
At its best, Chinese calligraphy is ineffably beautiful and seems to come from some transcendent celestial realm. Of course, in reality, such art doesn’t come from heaven at all. Instead it comes from distracted scholarly human beings carefully writing with bristle brushes sopping with India ink which, trust me, will not wash out of any textile. Indeed India ink stains most things other than the most impervious vitreous surfaces [sadly looks at black stipples, spots, and spatters on desk]. The Chinese attempted to coral this problem by manufacturing a class of small porcelain objects for the literati–exquisite brush rests! My favorite of these were made during the Ming Dynasty when handicraft cobalt glazed porcelain reached its aesthetic zenith.
Here is a little gallery of little Ming brush rests. I have great confidence in the authenticity of the first five of these rests which follow a familiar silk-road pattern (note the Persian and Arabic characters, which, I am told, say things like “brush stand” and “pen rest”). It is exciting to see how individual artisans take different directions with very similar designs and elements. Indeed, in the first two examples at the top, you can see how different glaze painters literally followed the same pattern (slavishly copying from a template was very common in the great Ming porcelain production centers–but the results strike our industrialized sensibilities as being quite markedly different).
The brush holders also exemplify how the glories of Ming ornamental design come from a mishmash of Chinese, Central Asian, and Middle Eastern sources. Even if the little stylized blue vines and flowers are clearly cobalt they still look realistic and seem as though they might wither if not watered or sprout additional buds.
Although these last two brush rests are different than the rest, the one above is pretty obviously a real Ming piece. The brush holder which seems out of place (and is not in the collection of the Met or the British Museum or the Liang Yi Museum) is the final one. I am of two minds about it. Although the super glossy porcelain has the look of real dynastic porcelain (along with some of the little brown spots and flea bites which are invariably found in actual handmade goods from Medieval China), there is something fishy about those ribbon-y scholars. I love the overall shape though and the the expressiveness of those escarpment rocks on the first and fourth peaks. I guess you will have to be the judge about the last one on your own.
The Chinese word for bat, “fu” (蝠) is the same as the Chinese word “fu” (福) for good fortune. Because the words are homonyms (indeed the characters are rather similar as well), Chinese art is absolutely filled with bats which nearly always represent best wishes for good fortune (although Zhang Guo Lao, the oldest and most eccentric of the 8 immortals, was said to have begun his existence as a primordial white bat of chaos).
At any rate, once you know what to look for, you start seeing bats everywhere in Chinese art and ornament. A particularly common motif is the wu fu, which features five bats representative of the five blessings: health, wealth, longevity, love of virtue, and a peaceful death. Various famous rebuses pair the wu fu with other geometric good luck symbols, and so we have the rebus of “Wu Fu Peng Shou” (five bats surrounding the symbol for longevity) or the Rebus of Wu Fu He He, which involves yet another complicated homonym (“he” means little round box, but “He He” was a goddess/fairy of nuptial felicity). When you see five bats surrounding a round geometric device (and now that you are looking for it, you WILL see it) you have chanced upon a rebus of Wu Fu He He.
Dear reader, I hope all of these fu symbols heap blessings upon you. May you know vigor, prosperity, old age, the love of virtue, and abundant benisons of all sorts! But I also hope that some of this fu transfers over to real bats. They are close cousins to us grasping, cunning primates, but the world we are making is bringing the chiroptera all sorts of problems! We will talk about that more in subsequent posts, but to finish this post, here is a peach fu vase of surpassing summery loveliness.
Yuan Jie (ca. 720 AD to 772 AD) was a poet, scholar, and politician of the Tang Dynasty. His intellectual and literary gifts allowed him to score high marks on the imperial exam which, in turn, allowed him to rise to high office. He helped finally suppress the An Lushan Rebellion (a dark era of insurrection and strife which left society in tatters). Although he rose to the rank of governor, Yuan Jie disliked his office and felt uneasy with his rank (and with the shallow fragile nature of society). As soon as his mother died, he resigned his rank. According to the sinologist Arthur Waley (who translated the following poem by Yuan Jie) the Chinese scholarly opinion of Yuan Jie at the end of the Ching dynasty was that “His subjects were always original, but his poems are seldom worth quoting.” Here is one of his poems (as translated to English by Waley) so that you may judge for yourself:
Stone Fish Lake
I loved you dearly, Stone Fish Lake,
With your rock-island shaped like a swimming fish!
On the fish’s back is the Wine-cup Hollow
And round the fish,—the flowing waters of the Lake.
The boys on the shore sent little wooden ships,
Each made to carry a single cup of wine.
The island-drinkers emptied the liquor-boats
And set their sails and sent them back for more.
On the shores of the Lake were jutting slabs of rock
And under the rocks there flowed an icy stream.
Heated with wine, to rinse our mouths and hands
In those cold waters was a joy beyond compare!
Of gold and jewels I have not any need;
For Caps and Coaches I do not care at all.
But I wish I could sit on the rocky banks of the Lake
For ever and ever staring at the Stone Fish.
While we sort things out here on Earth, let’s take a little break and check out how everything is going at a place which is so far away and yet so close–the dark side of the moon. Back at the very end of 2018 the Chinese Space Agency successfully landed a lunar probe on the far side of the moon (the first “soft” landing in that hemisphere ever). China has been diligently working on lunar exploration and, prior to this landing they had already launched a relay satellite named “Queqiao” into operational orbit about 65,000 kilometers (40,000 miles) beyond the moon so that their far-side probe would be able to communicate with Earth. Since the beginning of 2019, Chinese scientists have been exploring the moon’s dark side (which isn’t actually dark per se, but which is largely unknown to Earth’s inhabitants since the moon is tidally locked).
As the Chinese Yutu-2 rover was exploring terrain near the Von Kármán crater (a large impact site with a diameter of around 180 kilometers (110 miles)), the radio controlled vehicle found something interesting. The ground was covered in strange glistening green blobs which looked like something from H.G. Wells’ moon or from moon mission comic books of the 40s.
I couldn’t find a good photo, so I will use this fantasy illustration instead. Keen eyed viewers will spot salient geopolitical trends in the drawing.
Geologists and astrophysicists have been speculating as to the nature of these amorphous lumps (which stand out dramatically on the monochrome surface of the moon–not that that is evident in any of the photos I could find) and they now believe they have an explanation. The glossy lumps are probably a mixture of of pagioclase, iron-magnesium silicate, olivine and pyroxene. These minerals are known to be found on the moon thanks to NASA’s manned missions 5 decades ago. Speculation is that an intense impact melted them together into glass-like amorphous nodules of thesort which are foundin high energy events here on Earth (apologies to everyone who was hoping it was alien eggs or lunar bio-slime). There is still a mystery though: the regolith of the Von Kármán crater is not composed of these materials, so lunar scientists are still trying to understand where the glossy green rocks came from.
Today we are taking a peek at the future where new things are being built. Unfortunately, the United States has decided never to make (or even fix) anything ever again, so we have to look abroad for exciting (or just outlandish) new edifices. All of which is a way of introducing this incredible new stadium which is being built in China. Behold the concept drawings for the Guangzhou Evergrande Football stadium.
When I say “football” in this context, I don’t mean the American game of proxy warfare, but instead the accepted international name for soccer, a dull game which is sort of like slow hockey on a big grassy field. But who cares if the game is not worth watching? The stadium itself should prove to be so interesting that it will distract from the bland sporting spectacle.
An hour and a half of this
The Guangzhou Evergrande is designed in the shape of a sacred lotus, Nelumbo nucifera (a plant which we need to write about more). With seating capacity in excess of 100,000, it will take the crown of world’s largest soccer stadium from the Camp Nou Stadium in soccer-crazed Spain. If you are wondering what the grandiloquent name “Evergrande” means, it is the name of the real estate consortium building this giant concrete flower. I wish I could tell you more about the actual building of one of the mega stadiums (because I have a feeling that even the most general parameters are breathtaking), but alas, all I have is this picture of heavy lorries preparing for groundbreaking last week.
The stadium should be finished in 2022. Only time will tell if it turns into a beautiful world-famous landmark or if it is just another CAD torus with some fripperies on it. The lovable Chinese practice of building whimsical buildings which look like things makes me hope for the former, but the interchangeable tax-payer subsidized sports stadiums of the United States make me skeptical. We also need to know more about the lights which will be installed on it, because the 2008 Olympics revealed that the Chinese have a true flare for such things. Above all else, it is just a pleasure to see somebody actually working on something ambitious (even if it is a soul-devouring Chinese real estate consortium). Do you think we could learn to like soccer by 2022? I guess we will have to appreciate it as uhhh…novelty floral sculpture.
This picture certainly makes it look like it would be delicious if you ordered it at TGIFridays
Last week, the world met Bing Dwen Dwen, the official mascot of the 2022 Winter Olympics. He is one cute winter sports panda! I think the hosts of the upcoming winter Olympics did a fine job selecting him, however, when I wrote that post, I shamefully overlooked his companion mascot! At top up there is Shuey Rhon Rhon, a sentient lantern child who represents the 2022 Paralympic Games. According to the IOC press release “the name signifies warmth, friendship, courage and perseverance.”
A panda and a lantern may not seem like the world’s most natural mashup, yet they really are both emblematic of Chinese culture without being quite so nationalistic as classic 80s mascots like Misha the Bear and Sam the Eagle, who always seemed a bit like he was about to narrate how a bill becomes a law (“it passes the house and then is killed by Mitch McConnell…Screeee!”) Shui Rhon Rhon also has some nice fancy detailing, although the more I look at her, the more troubled I am by her timid demeanor and lack of a mouth.
The lack of a mouth might not be completely about social control though. The 2022 Olympics will take place in mid February…which is also the season of Lantern Festival (Yuan Xiao Festival), a holiday which celebrates deceased ancestors. Like the Olympics, The Lantern Festival aims to promote reconciliation, peace, and forgiveness. Yet, because of the holiday’s nature, the lantern girl has a dash of the other world to her (the dancing, flickering flames inside lanterns are famously symbolic of spirit).
What with all of the excitement over nine sided Venetian citadel-cities and neutron stars, we have been ignoring a big fuzzy lovable (and carefully-orchestrated) component of contemporary life: mascots. Fortunately, the planners of the upcoming Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics have made no such oversight and today (or yesterday in China?) they unveiled the Olympics mascot for 2022–a roly poly panda named Bing Dwen Dwen (pictured above).
Of course a professional ursologist (which is hopefully someone who studies bears and not just some sort of hissing urologist) might be perplexed by Bing Dwen Dwen’s oblong shape and strangely albescent color. This is not because he is a mutant bear or incorrectly rendered: Bing Dwen Dwen is encased in a full-body carapace of hardened ice (presumably to represent how cold and hard winter sports are). Likewise, the blood-colored heart on his paw is not to remind you that even the most adorable panda can be dangerous (which is true, by the way), but rather to represent the hospitality and bighearted generosity of the People’s Republic of China. Awww! Bing’s face is wreathed in fine lines of pure color which represent racers whipping around a track and advanced digital technology. To quote the official Olympics website, “The newly launched Olympic mascot resembles an astronaut, embracing new technologies for a future with infinite possibilities.”
Oh my goodness, how can it be SO cute?
The Olympics website also generalizes that pandas are deeply loved by people from all over the world…which is surprisingly true, actually. I think China made a good choice by selecting a supremely popular animal which is the exemplary archetype of all things Chinese. Leave the alien metal blobs for confused and divided nations. Let’s give an enthusiastic round of applause to the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and Jilin University of the Arts, which chose Bing from a vast pantheon of 5800 aspirant mascots. These Olympic mascot contenders were submitted by designers from around the world who hoped to participate in the Winter Olympics without sliding face first down an ice mountain. I wish I had known about the mascot contest: what could be more representative of winter sport than an armless flounder? But I guess I will save that idea for when the winter games are held in Antarctica (which may soon be the only place cold enough for winter sports).
In 1899 Wang Yirong, director of the Imperial Academy, noticed that Chinese pharmacists were selling dragon bones with strange mystical characters written on them (according to a fairly believable account, he was suffering from malaria and the ancient bones were prescribed to him as a quack remedy for his illness). This began an investigation which ended with the discovery of an archaeological site near Anyang, just north of the Yellow River in modern Henan province. The site is now known as Yinxu (literally “the ruins of Yin”) the capital of the Shang dynasty. The Shang dynasty (ca.1600 to 1046 BC) was the first known Chinese dynasty to be supported by any historical or archaeological evidence (although there are stories an earlier dynasty, the Xie Dynasty, the Xie is believed to be a myth or a dream). The City of Yin flourished from 1300 to 1046 BC. It was a place of palaces, foundries, workshops, tombs, walls, and wonders. There are reasons to believe that, during its heyday it was the greatest city the world has thus far seen.
We will talk more about Yinxu in later posts, but for right now let’s get back to those mysterious dragon bones or, as they are now called, “oracle bones.” Oracle Bones were animal bones (mostly turtle shells & ox scapulaes) which were used by used by ancient Chinese shamans to predict the future. Querants would ask their questions which were then carved onto the bones. The diviner would apply a hot metal rod to the bone which would cause it to crack apart. Then the shaman would interpret the future through the cracks in the bone.
The characters written on the oracle bones are the earliest known Chinese characters, and thus it is during the Shang that written history begins in China. We have elaborate genealogies of the Shang Dynasty (and we know what sort of questions the rulers and the elite asked of their augurs). The oracle bone script is certainly more pictographic in nature than “modern” Chinese script (which is coincidentally quite ancient) however it was already stylized and sophisticated–able to convey the full range of the Chinese language. Considering its enormous complexity there must be earlier precursors, but they are still lost…as are too many of the precious ancient oracle bones. Imagine how much ancient history was made into vile tasting “medicinal” broth that did nothing at all (just like the scales of the poor pangolins)! Chinese culture is an ancient marvel, but ancient Chinese medicine is a monstrosity which needs to be stopped!
ferrebeekeeper 