Mantou Kiln
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Mantou Kiln
The mantou kiln () or horseshoe-shaped kiln was the most common type of pottery kiln in north China, in historical periods when the dragon kiln dominated south China; both seem to have emerged in the Warring States period of approximately 475 to 221 BC.Wood It is named (in both English and Chinese) after the Chinese mantou bun or roll, whose shape it (very approximately) resembles; the ground plan resembles a horseshoe.Rawson, 365, diagram, 370; Wood The kilns are roughly round, with a low dome covering the central firing area, and are generally only 2 to 3 metres across inside. However it is capable of reaching very high temperatures, up to about 1370°C. There is a door or bricked-up opening at the front for loading and unloading, and one or two short chimneys at the rear. They are one type of "cross-draught" kilns, where the flames travel more or less horizontally, rather than up from or down to the floor. The kilns were normally made of brick; sometimes most of the structure was ...
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Vase With Peony Branch, Cizhou Ware, China, Jin Dynasty, 12th Or 13th Century, Stoneware - Cincinnati Art Museum - DSC03192
A vase ( or ) is an open container. It can be made from a number of materials, such as ceramics, glass art, glass, non-rusting metals, such as aluminium, brass, bronze, or stainless steel. Even wood has been used to make vases, either by using tree species that naturally resist dry rot, rot, such as teak, or by applying a protective coating to conventional wood or plastic. Vases are often decorative arts, decorated, and they are often used to hold cut flowers. Vases come in different sizes to support whatever flower it is holding or keeping in place. Vases generally share a similar shape. The foot or the base may be bulbous, flat, carinate, or another shape. The body forms the main portion of the piece. Some vases have a shoulder, where the body curves inward, a neck, which gives height, and a lip, where the vase flares back out at the top. Some vases are also given handles. Various styles and types of vases have been developed around the world in different time periods, such as ...
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Jun Ware
Jun ware () is a type of Chinese pottery, one of the Five Great Kilns of Song dynasty ceramics. Despite its fame, much about Jun ware remains unclear, and the subject of arguments among experts. Several different types of pottery are covered by the term, produced over several centuries and in several places, during the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), Jin dynasty (1115–1234) and Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), and (as has become clearer in recent years) lasting into the early Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Some of the wares were for a popular market, especially the drinking vessels, but others seem to have been made for the imperial court and are known as "official Jun wares"; they are not mentioned in contemporary documents and their dating remains somewhat controversial. These are mostly bowls for growing bulbs or flower-pots with matching stands, such as can be seen in many paintings of scenes in imperial palaces. The consensus that seems to be emerging, driven largely by th ...
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Chinese Pottery
Chinese ceramics show a continuous development since pre-dynastic times and are one of the most significant forms of Chinese art and ceramics globally. The first pottery was made during the Palaeolithic era. Chinese ceramics range from construction materials such as bricks and tiles, to hand-built pottery vessels fired in bonfires or kilns, to the sophisticated Chinese porcelain wares made for the imperial court and for export. Porcelain was a Chinese invention and is so identified with China that it is still called "china" in everyday English usage. Most later Chinese ceramics, even of the finest quality, were made on an industrial scale, thus few names of individual potters were recorded. Many of the most important kiln workshops were owned by or reserved for the emperor, and large quantities of Chinese export porcelain were exported as diplomatic gifts or for trade from an early date, initially to East Asia and the Islamic world, and then from around the 16th century to Eur ...
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Chinese Inventions
China has been the source of many innovations, scientific discoveries and inventions. This includes the ''Four Great Inventions'': papermaking, the compass, gunpowder, and printing (both woodblock and movable type). The list below contains these and other inventions in ancient and modern China attested by archaeological or historical evidence, excluding prehistoric inventions of Neolithic and early Bronze Age China. The historical region now known as China experienced a history involving mechanics, hydraulics and mathematics applied to horology, metallurgy, astronomy, agriculture, engineering, music theory, craftsmanship, naval architecture and warfare. Use of the plow during the Neolithic period Longshan culture (c. 3000–c. 2000 BC) allowed for high agricultural production yields and rise of Chinese civilization during the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600–c. 1050 BC). Later inventions such as the multiple-tube seed drill and the heavy moldboard iron plow enabled China to s ...
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Oxford Art Online
Oxford Art Online is an Oxford University Press online gateway into art research, which was launched in 2008. It provides access to several online art reference works, including Grove Art Online (originally published in 1996 in a print version, ''The Dictionary of Art''), the online version of the ''Benezit Dictionary of Artists'', and ''The Oxford Companion to Western Art''. It also provides access to other Oxford art reference works, including the ''Encyclopedia of Aesthetics ''Encyclopedia of Aesthetics'', published in 1998 by Oxford University Press, is an encyclopedia that covers philosophical, historical, sociological, and biographical aspects of Art and Aesthetics worldwide. The second edition (2014) is now availab ...'' (2nd edition), and ''The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms''. The site was updated on 1 December 2017 to enhance page design, search tools, linking, and media capabilities.
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Jessica Rawson
Dame Jessica Mary Rawson, (born 20 January 1943) is an English art historian, curator and sinologist. She is also an academic administrator, specialising in Chinese art. After many years at the British Museum, she was Warden (head) of Merton College, Oxford, from 1994 until her retirement in 2010. She served as pro-vice-chancellor at University of Oxford from 2006 for a term of five years. Biography Rawson's academic background is in Sinology with a particular research focus on the cosmology of the Han period (206 BC-AD 220) and its relation to tombs and their decoration. Educated at St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, West London, New Hall, Cambridge and the University of London, Rawson began her career in the civil service. Between 1976 and 1994, she served as Deputy Keeper and then Keeper of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum. From 1994 to 2010 she was Warden of Merton College, Oxford, and from 2006 to 2011 she served as pro-vice-chancellor ...
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Joseph Needham
Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham (; 9 December 1900 – 24 March 1995) was a British biochemist, historian of science and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science and technology, initiating publication of the multivolume ''Science and Civilisation in China''. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941 and a fellow of the British Academy in 1971. In 1992, Queen Elizabeth II conferred on him the Companionship of Honour, and the Royal Society noted he was the only living person to hold these three titles. Early life Needham's father, Joseph was a doctor, and his mother, Alicia Adelaïde, née Montgomery (1863–1945), was a music composer from Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland. His father, born in East London, then a poor section of town, rose to became a Harley Street physician, but frequently battled with Needham's mother. The young Needham often mediated. In his early teens, he was taken to hear the Sun ...
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Rose Kerr (art Historian)
Rose Kerr (born February 1953) is an English art historian specializing in Chinese art, especially Chinese ceramics, on which she has written a number of books. After studying Mandarin and Chinese art at the School of Oriental and African Studies (1971–75), she worked at the Percival David Foundation (1976–78). She joined the Far Eastern Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1978. She became the Keeper of the Far Eastern Department in 1987, a post she held until her retirement in 2003. In 2015, she was made an honorary citizen of Jingdezhen, China, the historic centre of Chinese porcelain production, in recognition of her academic research on Jingdezhen ceramics, and her promotion of cultural exchange between the United Kingdom and China. She was the first non-Chinese citizen to be so honoured. Early life Rose Kerr was born in February 1953. She graduated in Chinese studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and was one of a handful of Britis ...
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Jingdezhen
Jingdezhen is a prefecture-level city, in northeastern Jiangxi province, with a total population of 1,669,057 (2018), bordering Anhui to the north. It is known as the "Porcelain Capital" because it has been producing Chinese ceramics for at least 1,000 years, and for much of that period Jingdezhen porcelain was the most important and finest quality in China. The city has a well-documented history that stretches back over 2,000 years. History Throughout both the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the area of present-day Jingdezhen belonged to the Chu State. After the fall of the Chu, the area was incorporated into the Qin Dynasty as part of Fan County () in . Under the Han Dynasty, the area belonged to Poyang County () in . Under the Han Dynasty, the particular area of future Jingdezhen was known as Xinping (). Historical records show that it was during this time that it began to make porcelain. The town was established during the Jin Dynasty under the n ...
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Guan Ware
Guan ware or Kuan ware () is one of the Five Famous Kilns of Song dynasty China, making high-status stonewares, whose surface decoration relied heavily on crackled glaze, randomly crazed by a network of crack lines in the glaze. ''Guan'' means "official" in Chinese and Guan ware was, most unusually for Chinese ceramics of the period, the result of an imperial initiative resulting from the loss of access to northern kilns such as those making Ru ware and Jun ware after the invasion of the north and the flight of a Song prince to establish the Southern Song at a new capital at Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. It is usually assumed that potters from the northern imperial kilns followed the court south to man the new kilns. In some Asian sources "Guan ware" may be used in the literally translated sense to cover any "official" wares ordered by the Imperial court. In April 2015, Liu Yiqian paid US$14.7 million for a Guan ware vase from the Southern Song. Dating and kiln sites The ne ...
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Ming Dynasty
The Ming dynasty (), officially the Great Ming, was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1368 to 1644 following the collapse of the Mongol Empire, Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming dynasty was the last orthodox dynasty of China ruled by the Han Chinese, Han people, the majority ethnic group in China. Although the primary capital of Beijing fell in 1644 to a rebellion led by Li Zicheng (who established the short-lived Shun dynasty), numerous rump state, rump regimes ruled by remnants of the House of Zhu, Ming imperial family—collectively called the Southern Ming—survived until 1662. The Ming dynasty's founder, the Hongwu Emperor (r. 1368–1398), attempted to create a society of self-sufficient rural communities ordered in a rigid, immobile system that would guarantee and support a permanent class of soldiers for his dynasty: the empire's standing army exceeded one million troops and the naval history of China, navy's dockyards in Nanjin ...
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Jingdezhen Ware
Jingdezhen porcelain () is Chinese porcelain produced in or near Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province in southern China. Jingdezhen may have produced pottery as early as the sixth century CE, though it is named after the reign name of Emperor Zhenzong, in whose reign it became a major kiln site, around 1004. By the 14th century it had become the largest centre of production of Chinese porcelain, which it has remained, increasing its dominance in subsequent centuries. From the Ming period onwards, official kilns in Jingdezhen were controlled by the emperor, making imperial porcelain in large quantity for the court and the emperor to give as gifts. Although apparently an unpromising location for potteries, being a remote town in a hilly region, Jingdezhen is close to the best quality deposits of petuntse, or porcelain stone, in China, as well as being surrounded by forests, mostly of pine, providing wood for the kilns. It also has a river leading to river systems flowing north and sout ...
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