Chapter 1138 Blue is rare, drops are precious, silk is wonderful
It is estimated that many friends do not know much about Jian Zhan, or do not know the firing techniques at all, and do not know what kind of beauty Jian Zhan is.
Just look at it a thousand times. Only those who have seen Jianzhan and Liuxiazhan can truly know its beauty. Even just looking at pictures on the Internet is enough to make you marvel at the uncanny craftsmanship of the ancients.
After reading it,
You must be amazed, how did the ancients do it?
Not to mention the ancients, even the lamp-building craftsmen who have read a large number of ancient and modern research documents know what is happening but do not know why.
Many people read the technical documentation on Jianzhan firing as if they were reading a book from heaven.
In fact, many of the lamp-making masters cannot understand it.
On the one hand, there is a lack of professionalism. On the other hand, I have my own opinions, but it is difficult to express them in words or language.
This is a unique phenomenon caused by the generally low level of knowledge of current lamp-building craftsmen, unlike many purple clay masters who have undergone rigorous professional learning and inheritance.
But for most of us, some technical discussions on building kilns are still very meaningful.
The formation mechanism of obsidian is a probabilistic event, which is as difficult as winning a lottery ticket.
Even if the craftsmen know this mechanism, to achieve this effect, it really depends on luck.
This is also the reason why no one has been able to bake the Yao Bianzhan.
So Yaobian Tianmu cannot be fired in large quantities, what is the difficulty?
As we all know, Yaobian is a rare and precious variety of Jianzhan, one of the eight famous porcelains of the Song Dynasty in China.
But few people know that the difficulty of firing the Yaobian lamp is almost as difficult as the ancient Shu Dao, which is as difficult as climbing to the sky.
It is such a difficult small tea bowl that appeared entirely by God's will, but modern people have conquered its firing technology.
Chen Wenzhe had to lament that when it comes to making porcelain, some modern masters are more powerful.
And here, he also admires some foreign collectors and museums.
Whether public or private,
People dare to collect some fine works by domestic masters at high prices.
Don't think about it,
A few years later, these fine porcelains became a treasure collected abroad that shocked the Chinese people.
There is nothing we can do about this. We cannot say that the Chinese people are short-sighted. It is just that our economic development or foundation has not kept up with the pace of foreign countries.
"I didn't expect that I would have to use the skills of several masters for free!"
Inside the Pearl of Sui Marquis, there are records of the repeated burning and building of lamps by these three families for several generations.
One family is making rabbit-hair lamps, another is making obsidian lamps, and the third one is making tianmu lamps.
These are all Jianzhan, and they are all exquisite among Jianzhan. Among them, the rabbit hair lamp is the most common, and the oil drop, Yao transformation, or further Yao transformation to the third eye is the most difficult.
Learning naturally starts from the simple, step by step, step by step, so that you can master a new knowledge at a faster speed.
Chen Wenzhe naturally came from this way, so he was not in a hurry to learn how to bake and change his third eye.
Instead, he began to learn Yao Bian, or the rabbit-haozhan in Yao Bian.
Don’t think that the rabbit hair lamp is not as famous as the third eye of the kiln.
Don't underestimate it because you think that the rabbit hair lamp is not as good as the sun before it changes into the celestial eye lamp.
This kind of thing needs to be compared with someone.
Not to mention anything else, I just want to talk about the value of the rabbit hair lamp. Its price is not as good as the Yaobian Tianmu lamp, mainly because the Yaobian Tianmu lamp is too rare.
Of course, if it is difficult to make, it will definitely be rare and rare, and the price will naturally be high.
However, it is easy to make the exquisite rabbit hair lamp? This is also a kind of kiln-made lamp.
At the beginning, Chen Wenzhe tried his hand at baking. There were oil droplets and rabbit hairs, but there was no fine quality.
Take rabbit hairs for example, the most precious ones are gold, silver and blue rabbit hairs, but these all require a certain amount of luck.
Of course, if you have the technology, you can do directional firing, but this requires learning.
Therefore, if you want to build a high-quality lamp, you must thoroughly study the technology involved.
This is the reason why all jianzhan, including rabbit hair lamps, are cherished and relatively expensive.
For example, in the Poly Spring Auction in June 2021, the Fujita family’s jian kiln rabbit hair lamp was successfully auctioned for five days.
This rabbit-haired lamp from a Song Dynasty jian kiln, which once ranked third in the jianzhan auction rankings, was finally sold for 17.5 million yuan, which is equivalent to 20.15 million yuan plus commission.
This cup has a round shape, a gold buckle on the mouth edge, a thick and solid body, and is fully covered with glaze, which is bright and shiny.
The markings inside the lamp are exquisite and dazzling, with clear rabbit hair markings both inside and outside.
The silver-blue rabbit hair shines brilliantly under different angles of light.
At present, it is difficult to find a few comparable pieces of rabbit hair lamps in museum collections around the world.
As we all know, kiln building was founded in the late Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties, and reached its peak during the Song Dynasty.
The Tuhao tea cup is the most representative tea cup with the largest output from the kilns built in the Song Dynasty.
Not only does it often appear in the tea poems and lyrics of literati in the Song Dynasty, but it is also respected in tea books of the two Song Dynasties.
Huizong of the Song Dynasty even praised the rabbit-haired lamp in his "Daguan Tea Theory": "The color of the lamp is green and black, and the jade-haired lamp is the best."
As a representative of kiln construction, rabbit hair lamps are produced in large quantities, but how difficult is it to find the best ones?
In the Song Dynasty, the output of rabbit hair lamps was on a certain scale in the system of building kilns and lamps.
On the one hand, a large number of poets and lyricists in the Song Dynasty used rabbit-haired lamps in their poems to describe elegant tea events. This shows that these poets often used rabbit-haired lamps.
On the other hand, among the existing jianzhan lamps, the relatively large number of rabbit hair lamps in the collections of major museums in China and the world, especially the major neon museums, is relatively large.
At the same time, in the private collection world, there are also a large number of rabbit hair lamps collected.
At the Jianzhan site, a large number of fragments of rabbit-hair-patterned lamps were also unearthed.
These major phenomena verify that the number of rabbit hair lamps in the Song Dynasty was relatively considerable.
Therefore, we can ensure market supply and satisfy everyone’s preferences.
However, the supply and marketing relationship was definitely lower than demand due to the low production capacity at that time.
Although the rabbit hair lamps in the Song Dynasty had a certain production capacity, their quality was uneven.
There is a rumor in the industry that the yield rate of rabbit hair lamps in the Song Dynasty is 1 in 10,000. This is actually not accurate.
It would be more accurate to say that the quality rate of rabbit hair in the Song Dynasty was one in ten thousand.
In other words, what is difficult to bake is the best of the rabbit hair cups.
Although the finished product rate of jianzhan in the Song Dynasty was low, the production volume of each kiln could often reach tens of thousands.
Especially during the Southern Song Dynasty, the technology was completely mature, and the fired rabbit hair was not only limited to gold hair, but also silver hair and blue hair.
Among the various glaze patterns on rabbit hair lamps, silver rabbit hair patterns are the most precious and rare, and the firing is also the most difficult.
In the rabbit hair cup, the rabbit hair is dense and dense, with clear boundaries, a three-dimensional effect, and the best color is silver-blue.
The markings of the same rabbit will be clear in some places, blurred in others, and even show different colors in different places.
It's also possible that the markings have different transitions to make them more layered and three-dimensional.
As the saying goes: blue is rare, drops are precious, and silk is wonderful.