There are so many varieties of Flower God Cups that if you try to make them all, you won’t have to ask.
Therefore, Chen Wenzhe selected the classic types of utensils and made them once.
By this time, he had made nine of the ten most famous cups in history.
And the last one is the duck-shaped cup,
The duck-shaped cup was one of the more popular cup styles in the Tang Dynasty, and was mostly made of three-color ware.
The duck-shaped cup is vivid in shape, usually in the posture of a lying duck, with the duck's beak holding the cup body.
This kind of cup can also be used as a lamp, so it is also vividly called a "duck-shaped lamp".
This is actually the same as a lady’s lamp, there’s nothing surprising about it.
Many cups in ancient times could actually be used as lamps.
For example, if you pour oil on a lamp and put a wick on it, it is the simplest lamp.
The most famous duck-shaped cup from the Tang Dynasty is probably the Gongyi kiln duck-shaped cup from the Tang Dynasty.
Gongyi Kiln began in the Han Dynasty when pottery was fired.
Developed in the Northern Wei Dynasty, porcelain began to be fired during this period.
It matured in the Sui Dynasty, flourished in the Tang Dynasty, and declined in the Song and Jin Dynasties.
During the Northern Dynasties, celadon and white porcelain were produced, filling a gap in the history of Chinese ceramics.
The Sui Dynasty continued to develop on this basis. The Tang Dynasty mainly produced white porcelain, twisted body porcelain, black glaze, yellow glaze porcelain, etc.
These fired works all reflect the superb craftsmanship and profound cultural connotation of the craftsmen at that time.
The duck-shaped cup is one of the popular cup styles in the Tang Dynasty. Although it is not very precious, it is not easy to make a duck-shaped cup.
Especially if you want to make a Tang Sancai duck-shaped cup, if it is a Gong kiln duck-shaped cup, you must understand the kiln mouth and this kind of cup.
The general style is that the duck lies on the ground, turns back and holds the cup in its mouth.
The body of the cup is decorated with a circle pattern, which symbolizes the sprouting of grains and is a symbol of good luck.
In 2021, in Xing City, Beihe, in a place called Wangyao Village, Shiliting Town, an ancient tomb was discovered in a farmland that was exposed by rain erosion.
After rescue cleaning by archaeologists, it was discovered that the tomb was an arc-rectangular pointed-top tomb.
After opening the tomb, two clay pots and a celadon-glazed porcelain bowl were unearthed, including a duck-shaped cup.
Judging from the unearthed artifacts, tomb bricks and the shape of the tomb, the age of the tomb is from the Sui Dynasty to the early Tang Dynasty.
Hebei belongs to Yanzhao in ancient times. It has a profound cultural heritage, a long history, and rich and colorful material cultural heritage, including the eye-catching Tang style and Tang rhyme.
When talking about the fine ceramics of this era, we cannot leave out Qiong Kiln.
During the Spring Festival in 2006, at the first CCTV treasure competition held by CCTV, a Qiong kiln collector's underglazed red melon prismatic water basin won the bronze medal and was hailed as "the most red in the world".
After the Qiong Kiln was stolen in the 1930s and held two ancient ceramic seminars in the 1980s, it once again attracted the attention of the world.
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In fact, this kind of copper-red glazed Qiong Kiln utensils and fragments have been seen from time to time in archaeological excavations of Qiong Kiln.
Because the firing skills of Qiong Kiln had reached a considerable height in the Tang Dynasty, and based on this, they achieved a new leap in the Five Dynasties period.
From the Tang Dynasty to the Five Dynasties, the economy of the Sichuandu Plain was developed, which promoted the prosperity of the city and provided direct driving force and market space for the development of the ceramic industry.
At that time, the dragon kiln, which was already commonly used in Qiong Kiln, was further improved.
At that time, the kiln body consisting of the fire chamber, kiln chamber, smoke exhaust hole, and chimney was lengthened and the kiln bed slope was reduced to save fuel, balance the kiln temperature, improve quality, and increase output.
Such a large dragon kiln can hold and bake tens of thousands of porcelains at one time.
In the 1980s, during the archaeological excavation of Shifangtang, nine dragon kilns of different lengths from different periods were discovered.
In the cultural layer of the Tang Dynasty included in Kiln No. 5, a small steamed bun kiln also appeared, which was the forerunner of the creation of high-end products in the late Tang and Five Dynasties.
The fragmentary sagger with the inscription "Leap in the Sixth Year of Zhenyuan" collected from the site shows that the sagger firing technique of Qiong Kiln in the Tang Dynasty has been popularized.
Moreover, the support pins are reduced and smaller, which avoids the contamination of the body by flue gas dust, making the shape of the vessel more correct, the glaze surface smoother, and the quality comprehensively improved.
Due to the continuous improvement of molding technology, especially in the Five Dynasties period, the knife skills used to make the shape of the utensils became sharper, the lines became tougher, and the texture of the carcass gradually changed from thick and heavy to light and delicate.
As for the shape of the feet, except for a small number of ring feet and jade feet, they are still mainly cake-shaped with beveled foot ends, which is different from other kiln mouths.
Moreover, the Qiong kiln's characteristic of focusing on daily utensils is more prominent than other kilns.
The categories and shapes are even more colorful.
In terms of shape, Qiong kiln in the Tang Dynasty, like other kiln mouths, has a grand and rounded character of the times.
Its typical utensils include large cake-footed bowls, short-flow pots, tall-footed cups, multi-footed inkstones, etc.
In the late Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties, in addition to bowls, plates, jars, lamps, water bowls, etc., the emergence of porcelain figures and animal toys has broken through the daily use of ceramics and begun to move into the category of art.
The shape of Sui bowls changed from deep belly, straight mouth, and flat bottom to extravagant mouth (sometimes in the shape of petals), curved belly, thin walls, and cake feet.
However, circle feet and jade feet did not appear in large numbers until the Five Dynasties, which seems to be "half a beat slower" than other kiln entrances.
Such as cake-based bowls, celadon bowls with flower mouths, and jade-bill celadon bowls.
Then there are cups. Different from the deep-bellied, high-flared, and ring-footed cups that were popular at the time in imitation of gold and silverware, Qiong kiln also had single-eared cups with an inverted belly shape.
Such as the "Linqiong" cup.
The "duck cup" imitating the shape of animals is a unique shape of Qiong Kiln.
The third is the holding pot, which is a new type of porcelain that appeared in the Tang Dynasty.
Their shapes and sizes vary, some are as tall and round as a jar, and some are as thin and tall as a bottle.
Its flow is neither shallow before the Sui Dynasty, nor like the long flow and long meandering flow in the Song Dynasty. Most of them are hard, short straight flows, such as the rope-shaped pot holding the pot and the long belly holding the pot.
Then there are Zhuzi. The large number of Zhuzi is more related to the changes in the tea drinking style and methods at that time.
The shape of Qiong kiln pots is similar to an oblate jar, mostly double-shaped, straight mouth, short straight.
It is rare to see a round-mouthed and flat-bottomed cup, as well as the matching saucer and teacup.
The shape of this type of tea set that was popular in the Tang Dynasty was different from the purple clay tea sets of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and the tendency of the bowl cover was different.
But it directly affected the development of Japanese and Korean tea drinking utensils and methods.
The character shapes of porcelain sculptures in the Tang Dynasty were influenced by the Buddhist carvings in the caves. They changed the style of the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties with elegant bones and clear appearance, and presented a Tang Dynasty aesthetic orientation that was either plump or heroic.
Qiong kiln porcelain sculptures from the Tang and Five Dynasties periods were mostly made of children or exquisite and lively dolls such as monkeys, puppies, birds, and turtles, which were full of the atmosphere and interest of worldly life.
Of course, there are also lively and varied character shapes.
Such as the dancing figurines and ball-holding figurines of the Tang Dynasty.
The Hu figurines and the Hu figurines holding horns reflect the active foreign exchanges of Qionglai (Linqiong) at that time and the influence of multiculturalism on the development of Qiong Kiln.
Cups with beams and fuel-saving lamps should be regarded as another type of representative utensils of Qiong kiln.