JAPAN
black, of these varieties were absolutely inimitable. They remain to this day inimitable. To the Japanese keramist of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the aspect of such masterpieces must have been deterrent. Katō Shirozaemon does not appear to have dreamed of imitating, still less of emulating, them. His glazes were admirable in their way, but they did not approach the beauty of the Chinese wares. Moreover, when Kato visited China (1223), power of the great Sung dynasty had already waned and was soon to be altogether eclipsed; keramic industry, which owed so much to Court patronage, was comparatively paralysed, and the Chinese who acted as Kato's instructors were probably themselves incompetent to grapple with difficulties which to him seemed insuperable. Thenceforward, throughout the Yuan dynasty of Mongols (1260–1367), it must have been manifest to the Japanese that the potters of the Middle Kingdom had lost much of their old cunning. The clair de lune, with blood-red splashes or clouds, of the Yuan-su-yao was the only keramic chef-d'œuvre that crossed the sea, and, beautiful as it was, it cannot but have appeared even less imitable than any of its predecessors, except, perhaps, the Chien-yao. Then followed the expulsion of the Mongols from their usurped place in China, and the accession of the native dynasty of the Ming (1368–1644). At first the keramic art did not feel the change much; but from Yung-lo (1403–1425) and Hsuan-tē era (1426–1436) throughout the periods of Cheng-hua (1465–1488), Hung-chih (1488–1505), and Cheng-tē (1506–1521), Japan received from the Middle Kingdom specimens which showed that the industry had entered a new phase. The egg-shell porcelain of Yung-lo; the exquisitely clear, pure blues of Hsuan-
20
