Tʻang

The first missionaries to China, men of the Buddhist faith, called the land Chin-tan, or Dawn. Centuries later, when the rulers of the Tʻang dynasty had made the Empire the most polished nation of the world, the Hills of Tʻang became the popular name for the whole land, a designation still frequently used in regions south of the Yang-tzŭ Kiang. This little volume does not pretend to discuss fully either the land or the people of China. All that is attempted is to furnish a glimpse of the hills and men of Tʻang, and to sketch, in outline, the Christian dawn as it is touching mountain and plain, city and hamlet, throughout this most populous empire.

So, even in comparatively modern China, 1500 years later, the third emperor of the T‘ang dynasty married his father’s concubine, and she ultimately reigned as empress in her own right, which is in itself an outrage upon the “rites.”

At the present time it is reasonable to accept the tradition that Jao-chou, which had first come into production in the T‘ang dynasty, though somewhat intermittently,¹ began to develop a clearly defined range of white porcelains during the Sung, the potters, however, seeming only to have worked at times when the demands of agriculture were not too exacting, or when the season was bad.