Nothing wrong with this neck, though

(Or: if you can't get the neck right, remove it).

About 4 inches in diameter.

What I cannot photograph is the experience of holding one of these things in your hand: the bowls and their lids fit together perfectly; and they weigh -- nothing: the porcelain seems no thicker than an egg-shell and you get the impression that a merest breath would cause them to float away in the air. I saw them for the first time about a week before I could buy them; and during that whole week, every time I recalled holding them in my hand, a soft, warm feeling arose in my chest, like a steamed Chinese bun. And when I closed my eyes at night, I could see their zany colors float up before my eyes. What incredibly precise painting! And what an audatious move: purple dragons?! Only Qianlong could have dared to come up with that.

Paid for the two about a third of I paid for the mynah-vase, too. Peanuts. Not even a hundred bucks. A crap dinner for two with mediocre wine would cost more. I simply cannot believe it. Can you?

On picking one, or, why aesthetics should be taught in school

You know about the silk brocade wrapper, I suppose. Except... this one is yellow. And you know what that means, of course.














The quality of the painting is very impressive: note that this bird is about 5 cm long in the original!


But then you turn it over to see the seal and... no, it does not say "Made in the Qianlong reign of the Great Qing"! It says... Gugong -- which is to say, of course, The National Palace Museum.


These copies -- this one is of a very famous Qianlong piece dated to 1742 (see here) -- are mass produced now, somewhere on the Mainland -- I am told in Guangdong. But they are produced by traditional techniques and the level of technical attainment is really very high.

Picking the vase I wanted from among the seven that were available was an interesting exercise:

1. One was not stable -- something went wrong with the foot in the initial firing.

2. Another one I rejected because of its shape -- the gall-bladder shape is famously difficult to reproduce. This is important -- the potter must achieve seemless, shoulderless curvature as the body profile inflects from concave to convex around the neck and shoulder (which ought to be indistinguishable). This is very hard to do. The rejected piece looked decidedly shouldered, even square-shouldered, like a football player in armor, and therefore -- graceless. Even in this case, the shape is not perfect, but at best satisfactory. My vase is therefore not a true collector's item; it will neither appreciate in value nor even store it. But I could not have the best shaped vase -- which was as close to perfect as I have ever seen: its painting was awful; and I wanted to have one of these -- on my desk, now, and it had to be at least passable.

3. I rejected another vase because it had a firing flaw: a serious flaw, in fact: too large to be on display in the museum. The piece ought to have been destroyed at the workshop, not shipped out to ruin the potter's name.

4. I rejected another yet because it had a barely perceptible stain on the glaze -- someone handled it with dirty hands before second firing and fixed his fingerprint in eternity for us to admire.

5. And among the remaining three there were noticeable differences in the quality of painting. This painter pleased me especially with his fine, small-brush detail of bird feathers, even though his flowers were paler than on the other vases; nor was his tree bark as gratifyingly gnarly. But I figured: this genre of decoration -- huaniao -- flowers and birds -- requires well painted birds, right?

Back in the days of Qianlong, one vase -- or perhaps two -- would have been selected from among not seven but perhaps -- a thousand; and the rest of the production -- would have been destroyed. The resulting unsurpassed quality of the imperial pieces affects their price (in tens of millions of dollars these days, if you can ever find one) as much as the fact that they once belonged to The Main Man Himself.

*

A footnote is in order. "Mass produced" -- a word I used above -- is a funny word: it still takes many men and many man-hours to produce each bottle by hand... And the quality of the best pieces is hardly "mass" in any way. I should really be careful about what I say...

After all, the production run cannot be very large: all the porcelain people here confirm this: the production of these copies has moved to China, true, but that was not much of a loss because... -- and this is the point -- the market for them has disappeared. Modern Taiwanese middle class is no longer educated to appreciate the traditional arts. In fact, Taiwanese middle class, like the middle class everywhere else in the world, is no longer educated at all in terms of aesthetics. It is taught to be good doctors and engineers and brokers and mathematicians -- those things which advance the state's cause of ever-rising GDP; but in the matter of enjoyment of life's pleasures, the middle class is left to its own devices, abandoned by the education system, left languishing in the joyless darkness of ignorance. Absent most rudimentary guidelines, it is preyed upon by the purveyors of childish glitter and empty notoriety -- the sort of BS in art it would not accept from quack doctors or fake religious prophets.

Now, if, like me, you think that sex education is a good thing not only because it allows for family planning and disease control but also because it helps people experience more joy in their lives -- makes them happier, and therefore, presumably more productive and more law abiding -- then you must admit that there are good arguments for instating aesthetic education in school.

Mountain memories

Very many years ago I lived here. I was a student then -- the Normal University gave me a scholarship to study Chinese -- but as that was not enough, and as I was eager to get ahead, I also worked. I woke up at 4 a.m. and studied; at 7 a.m. I taught an English class to bankers; at 8 I went to my Chinese class; at 10 I taught my favorite class -- a group of "retired" housewives (there is a sweet spot in a traditional housewife's life, when the children have grown up and gone to work; but the husband still works; his hours are still long and his income has reached its peak; as a result she has both free time and money to burn); at twelve I lunched with my students and went home to take a nap; then at 5 p.m. I began to teach again and taught till 10; and some days till midnight. It was a pretty busy life.

Taipei was then a sick city -- nightmarish traffic, horrible air. It has since de-congested (much business has left the city for China); and built the subway; yet, even today it smells of gasoline early in the morning; back then it seemed to me the seventh ring of hell. So, on weekends, I fled to the country. Usually, I got up at 5, took the first bus out of Tapei to Keelung and from there I hitched whatever ride I could. (I once even rode in a garbage truck). There were hardly any white dudes in Taiwan then, and in the countryside none at all. All I had to do is stand by the road side and wave: every car stopped to see what was going on. "Can I ride with you?" I would ask and the drivers would always be surprised ("what a weird idea!") and would always say "qing ni" ("I invite you"). We'd ride some distance and chat. "What on earth are you doing here?" they wanted to know. But often they were far more interesting than me. (Read on).

My direction was east. The island's west has wide, fertile plains, large successful cities, factories, dense population, and a few monuments of traditional Chinese life, such as is no longer to be found in China proper where the cultural revolution has destroyed much of it. But the east, separated from the west by the central north-south spine of high mountains -- 4 thousand meters high -- is a wild country, hard to reach, rough, and incredibly beautiful. It's hard to reach by air since there are few places where planes can land; and it is hard to reach by land because the rough mountains make access difficult; and regular mighty earthquakes keep dropping tunnels, ripping down bridges and tumbling down whole sections of tarmac.



In many places in the east, the mountains come all the way to the sea. In several places, where five- or six-hundred meter sheer rock drops into the ocean, the coastal road bores into the mountain side; cars travel in a kind of intestine, some 200 or 300 meters above the sea level: rock above, rock below, rock to the right, and to the left the intense blue of the glittering sea. A section of that road (Su-Ao) is time-wise one-way. By which I mean that 9 am to 12 pm cars travel south. A check point at the northern end of the section counts them then radioes their number south to the final check point there. That check point then counts them on their way out before the road is closed north-south and opened south-north and cars are let into the opposite direction.

I once traveled on the Su-Ao section with three civil engineers, who, being engaged in the road's maintenance, had a permit to travel up it in the wrong direction. You'd think they'd go slow: no such luck. We barreled north like madmen; blasting the horn at every turn was our only security precaution; otherwise traffic was the usual Taiwanese: we talked dirty, listened to Taiwanese songs, sang along, ate binglang (betel nuts), pitched out favorite stock picks, discussed the best kinds of moonshine and where to pick it up, and the most reliable aphrodisiacs; every now and then the driver cast a passing glance at the road; once in a blue moon he suddenly swerved to avoid a head on collision.

About half way down the coast is the Taroko Gorge: a narrow pass turns left, inland, and leads up the main range.


Yes, that crack in the sheer rock below: that is the road leading up the gorge.

Eventually, that road takes you to the top:

Photography does not do justice to the view: on the horizon there is a feature barely perceptible in photography but clear as the palm of your hand to the naked eye: the horizon: the line where the sea (visible from the top of the road) meets the sky. Looking from the height of the Li-shan tunnel (about 2.500 meters above sea level), you can just make out that the earth is round: the horizon curves ever so slightly. (The effect is very obvious from the top of mount Fuji, in Japan, which, being 4000 meters high and right at the sea-shore, offers an even better vantage point).

Here, in the rare air of the high mountains, I have had other memorable encounters -- with the old man who ran the Li-Shan youth hostel, a former soldier of Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang, the nationalist army which, having lost the war in China, evacuated to the recently seized Taiwan. He was, he said, twenty when, drafted into the army, he had to bid good bye to his just married wife; by the time I met him, it had been forty years since he'd last seen her. She'd remarried, had children and grandchildren, and was, somewhere in Hunan, a matron to three generations of her new husband's descendants. But he still loved her. He had remained faithful. His voice broke and his eyes welled up with tears when he spoke.

Then, there were the gold prospectors. Gold, it turns out, can be found in small quantities anywhere. Life in the mountains is cheap: one lives in a tent, shoots most of his food. To live well all one needs if 10 or 20 ounces of gold a year. That, it seems, can be found almost anywhere. Not economic for commercial production but to keep the soul and body of a lazy bone -- easy enough to find and extract. And your wives? I asked. Guan tamen, was the answer: the devil may care.

And then there was the Bunun headman's son on the other side of the Li-shan tunnel, in Nantou County. The Bunun are a mountain folk -- or, as the polite language has it -- the aborigines. Some twenty tribes once lived on the island, before the coming of the Chinese. Some of them took a few Polish heads when Beniowski arrived here in 1771, touching land somewhere near Keelung. ("Hey, look at this white head I took", said one to another presenting his catch. "A nice addition to my collection, don't you think?" "That's nothing, old man", said the other, "check this out: I got a red-head!") Today at least nine tribes remain -- some 300,000 people -- depending on how you count them. (There are still places -- like Ba Du ("eighth bump") and Qi Du ("seventh bump") near Taipei -- and others, like Jiu Fen ("Seventh Division"), near Keelung which record the successive steps by which the aborigines had been driven out of the flatlands and up into the hills).

Well, this Bunun fellow had, at the entrance to his house (otherwise perfectly normal Taiwanese farm house) a rack and in it some dozen or dozen and a half-heads. Seeing me pale, he rushed to explain: "Oh, these are my grandpa's. We don't do that anymore."

My favorite memory remains that of the Taiwanese truck driver on the Gong-Heng Gong-lu (Central East-west highway which eventually connects into the Taroko gorge) who, at every dangerous turn, took his hands off the wheel, and his eyes off the road, in order to burn paper money and throw it out the window to propitiate the hungry ghosts of the drivers who had fallen to their deaths on all those dangerous pin turns. For safety's sake, of course.

And the snow-white-headed white-dude, professor of Chinese from Oxford, who once picked me up somewhere on the Nantou County side of the Li-shan pass; and, impressed by my Chinese complained about his students; (it is easy to be impressed by my Chinese, most western students never learn to speak the language at all). It was great fun speaking to him: I was at the time bedding one of his students in Taipei and she thought he was the worst language teacher she had ever had.
.

The earthly success of the Lims

.

I spent a better part of the afternoon last night learning about the irreversible nature of time. I was at an exhibition of Qing curio boxes -- an interesting show both on account of the technical mastery required to produce them; and on account of their kinship with the contemporaneous western Wunderkammer collections -- kinship with a difference: instead of collecting, like any other normal people, objects the Chinese curio collectors collected... their miniature effigies.

One could wax philosophical here on the Huntington themes, but a much simpler message forced itself upon me: I discovered that I was too old for the show. The objects were small, behind glass and the light was dim. I squinted at them glasslessly, then through my reading glasses, then in my prescription glasses, finally with the help of a small magnifying glass; yet, from more than half of the displays I had to walk away unsatisfied: I would never catch the details. It was all nothing but blur to me. I have missed, it would seem, the chance to admire them.

I suppose this is what happened to my Taiwanese friends, too. Encouraged -- compelled! -- by their families, teachers, and friends, they went out and were productive: they worked 12-hour a day jobs, saved and economized, and gave birth to numerous children. Now, thirty years of hard work has born its fruit: their children are healthy and tall, intelligent and well educated, and soon they will be loosed upon the world to make their mark upon it. And they have amassed a great deal of property which they will pass on to their children: several apartments in the city, acres of land and houses in the countryside. (Being traditional Chinese they believe in only one store of value: land). But they have grown old and frail; their bodies have acquired the usual long list of chronic complaints; not debilitating, by any means, but enough to make simple comfort a matter of considerable rarity and difficulty. They have lived this otherwise successful life frugally and selflessly, devoid of luxuries and pleasures, without the smallest measure of self-indulgence (except, of course, for food, which was always simple, economic fare). Now, knowing them as closely as I do (as a non-Chinese outsider I am on occasion able to pierce the veil of pretense imposed by the society) I know what few do: how intensely unhappy they have been all these years; how much they have had to sacrifice; how much pleasure and gratification they have delayed, thinking sometimes no doubt that it was temporarily delayed, while it fact it was, as they now well know, like my ability to appreciate Qing curios, foregone; lost never to come back.

Today, their happiness consists in this: at their parents' farm, over the Chinese New Year, four generations of Lims sat down to eat a sumptuous feast: 78 people: 2 parents, 12 children, 62 grandchildren, and -- a sign of things to come, the first shoots of the next generation -- 2 great-grand-children. This was their success. It sounds Biblical. The earth has been populated. The Lim tribe has become an economic power to reckon with. The Lim ancestors have been assured of progeny to sustain them into infinity by their worship¹.

Yet, for me, it is hard to tell what my friends have gained through this personally. Millionairies, they still economize. He insists on wearing plastic shoes to work. She will still not send laundry out to wash.

Yet, sitting with their relatives at the jam-packed six tables, eating and talking, they say they are content. This is the warmth of the family, they say; this is their reward. Anyone who knows the Taiwanese knows that being in their company can be nothing but pure pleasure; not only for us, foreigners, I am sure, but, surely, for the Taiwanese themselves. If you didn't know them as I do, you would never know what I do -- and what they seem not to remember on most days -- the cost in self-sacrifice and denial paid for this family warmth.

On the fourth day of the New Year, six nephews and nieces -- all between 18 and 22 -- drop in for a day on my friend, Mr Lim. He spends the morning cooking for them, and the afternoon feeding them, with an expression of absolute delight on his face. "You are their favorite uncle", I say to him, and he beams. He is the traditional ideal male: he lives to feed people. He likes it. If you ask him he will say, and he believes it firmly, that personal happiness is irrelevant.

My grandfather came from a similar background to his: a hard working, farming family of modest means. And he lived his life in a similar manner: relentlessly making a living in order to feed countless mouths; he paid for the project the way Mr Lim is still paying for his: by denying himself simple comforts and pleasures, by never resting and sleeping very little, by putting up with an unhappy marriage, cheap clothes, uncomfortable furniture; in short, by taking nothing for himself out of his life. Men like my grandfather, and Mr Lim, think themselves virtuous; and think virtue to consist in constantly giving and taking nothing in return. Virtue to them is a kind of perpetuum mobile, an economic engine which never stops and runs on empty. It is hard not to admire these wonderful traditional men. But it is also difficult not to feel sad for them.

But perhaps one should not. Their life protects them against one pain at least, the pain of the Chinese curio box. They'll never know what they are missing there; and -- they won't miss it.



Footnote: On the origin of the surname Lin (Lim)

¹ During the reign of Shang Zhou, 1154 BC to 1122 BC, the last king of the Shang dynasty (1783 BC to 1122 BC) had 3 of his uncles advising him and his administration. The king's uncles were Bi Gan (also spelled Pi Kan), Qi Zi and Wei Zi. Together the 3 men were known as "The Three Kindhearted Men of Shang" in the kingdom.

Bi Gan was the son of Prince Ding, son of Emperor Shang and, thus, was King Zhou's uncle.

Unfortunately, Zhou was a cruel king and the state's citizens suffered tremendously. His 3 uncles could not persuade him to change his ways. Failing in their duty to advise the king, Wei Zi resigned. Qi Zi faked insanity and was relieved of his post. Only Bi Gan stayed on to continue advising the king to change his ways. “Servants who are afraid of being killed and refrain from telling the truth are not righteous,” he said. This put him in danger of incurring the king's wrath. Bi Gan stayed at the palace for three days and nights to try to persuade the bloodthirsty and immoral king to mend his ways.

The stubborn king would not relent and had his uncle, Bi Gan, arrested for treason. Upon hearing this, his pregnant wife (surname Chen) escaped into the forest to protect her unborn child from death. She knew, in time, the king would execute Bi Gan and his entire family. In the forest the baby was born. Alone with no one to help, she grabbed hold of two trees and gave birth to a baby boy whom she named Jian. When she reached the nearest town, she gave her child the surname Lin (Chinese character depicted by two trees).

Thanks to the efforts of my friends, the spirits of Bi Gan and his son are well taken care of for decades to come.

All I ever needed to know I had learned years back

The stunning decorative porcelains from the Chianlung period show at the National Palace Museum (here) is a chance to a) see old friends, b) see their never before seen friends (who chill their heels in cool dark of the museum storage caverns), c) learn that some friends have twins (having been executed in pairs; sometimes quartets; the NPM has at least two of these, for instance), and above all d) learn that one may go round the world to see everything it has to offer and in the end decide that what he still likes best what he had liked in the beginning.



It is also a chance to learn, thanks to a great educational video -- part of the show -- the 12 step production process:

1. Throw the piece on wheel using wet clay. This produces a surprisingly rough-hewn, fat, lumpy object. In fact, it looks surprisingly like the sort of stuff your friends throw in their weekend pottery class.
2. Let it dry and then carve and grind it (yes!) into final shape. This is what produces the extra-fine, thin walls and elegant shapes. The connoisseur's expression "well potted" does not mean "well-thrown", it means well well carved!
3. Paint the reign mark on the foot of the object.
4. Apply white glaze. (Spray).
5. Let dry and load in the furnace.
6. Fire. (The glaze turns clear, leaving a shiny white body with a clear reign mark).
7. Draw the decor design using charcoal.
8. Apply color glaze and let dry. (The decor design remains visible through the partly transparent glaze).
9. Carve the dry color glaze. There are two options: 1. carve all the way through to the (previously fired) clear gaze underneath. This leaves flat areas which can be painted in later. These will be the roundels for landscape or figurative scenes; or the scrolling colored leaves and flowers. Or 2. carve half-deep. This leaves a fine, barely impressed, somewhat lighter in color barely perceptible pattern which looks like -- well, brocade. (Magnify the two purple objects beneath to see the pattern within the purple "background").
10. Fire to fix the color glaze.
11. Paint the decorative elements (color flowers, landscapes, figurative elements).
12. Fire again to fix the painted decorations.

(The high rates of breakage and failure at every step make flawless pieces literally unique).



Some objects are decorated without the scrolling brocade pattern.


Here is a pair of dishes, top (enamel painting on white glaze) and bottom (brocade pattern yellow with painted scrolling flowers).




The quality of the miniature painting on these pieces is stunning. Enlarge yourself:



Having seen so much pottery everywhere in the world, I remain helpless slave of the detail, technical mastery and rich color of Qing fencai pieces.

In which I am, I suppose, like Ibn Battuta of Tangier, who, having traveled half the world, returned home and for the next 30 years, until his dying day, never left the city of his birth again.

PS. The video and the objects used in its production (and now part of the display at the show) suggest that someone still commands this technique. This could be the Jia Yang Company, of Jing de Zhen, listed in the credits. It has no internet presence.