Tang sancai is a general name for low-fired, lead-glazed pottery, commonly using yellow, green, white, and other glaze colors. Many pieces were used in burials, but forms and functions varied. The term three colors describes a type of pottery rather than limiting every object to exactly three colors.
Historical background
Sancai is a versatile type of decoration on Chinese pottery and other painted pieces using glazes or slip, predominantly in the three colours of brown (or amber), green, and a creamy off-white. It is particularly associated with the Tang dynasty (618–907) and its tomb figures, appearing around 700. Therefore, it is commonly referred to as Chinese: Tang Sancai in Chinese. Tang sancai wares were sometimes referred in China and the West as egg-and-spinach by dealers, for their use of green, yellow, and white, especially when combined with a streaked effect.
The Tang dynasty three-color glazed pottery is the treasure of ancient Chinese ceramic firing techniques. It is a kind of low-temperature glazed pottery popular in the Tang dynasty. The glaze has yellow, green, white, brown, blue, black and other colours. The yellow, green, and white colour-based are predominant, so people call it "Tang Sancai". Because the Tang Sancai was unearthed in Luoyang earliest and is most found in Luoyang, it is also known as "Luoyang Tang Sancai".
It uses lead-glazed earthenware, and although two firings were needed, it was easier and therefore cheaper to make than Chinese porcelain or celadon, and suitable for making large figures, if necessary made up of several moulded sections assembled after a first firing. Vessels, mostly rather small and made for burial, were made in the technique as well as figures. Small plates with three feet, typically about 18–40 cm (7–16 inches) across, called "offering-trays", are a distinctive type, with more carefully controlled decoration than other types of pieces.
Technique
The body of sancai ceramics was made of white clay, coated with coloured glaze, and fired at a temperature of 800 degrees Celsius. Sancai is a type of lead-glazed earthenware: lead oxide was the principal flux in the glaze, often mixed with quartz in the proportion of 3:1. The polychrome effect was obtained by using as colouring agents copper (which turns green), iron (which turns brownish yellow), and less often manganese and cobalt (which turns blue).
At kiln sites located at Tongchuan, Neiqui county in Hebei and Gongxian in Henan, the clays used for burial wares were similar to those used by Tang potters. The burial wares were fired at a lower temperature than contemporaneous whitewares. Large figures made for grave goods in burials (burial wares), such as the well-known Tang dynasty tomb figures with people, camels and horses, were cast in sections, in moulds with the parts luted together using clay slip. In some cases, a degree of individuality was imparted to the assembled figurines by hand-carving.
When used together, the glazes ran into each other at the edges, giving much of the character of the decoration. Apart from the precisely painted offering-trays, which mostly have moulded contours for the areas in different colours, in most pieces the colours are applied loosely, even carelessly. Splashing and spotting are often used, and on both vessels and figures the colours often do not attempt to follow relief areas or different parts of the bodies. Decorative motifs, in painting or relief, are borrowed from textiles, jewellery and metalwork.
Development
Sancai wares were made in north China using white and buff-firing secondary kaolins and fire clays. Sancai follows the development of green-glazed pottery dating back to the Han period (25–220 AD); the brown glaze was also known to the Han, but they only very rarely mixed the two in a single piece. After the Han the use of these glazes almost disappears for some four hundred years, which has rather puzzled experts. The great majority of survivals are from burial goods, which in the intervening period are painted with pigments that are not fired (and so have now mostly fallen off the piece). But a trickle of pieces shows a "tenuous lead-glazing tradition linking Han to Sui and T'ang".