CHINESE ART. and steatite, and of ivory, is an art especially identified with China. Jade carvings are of great elaboration, as where a single piece containing 250 cubic inches is wrought into two complete vases, side by side and separated from one another, except as leaves and twigs, all cut out of the solid mass, connect them. 639 trast with the exquisite clouded gradations of the It is in enameling upon metal and in textile fabrics and embroidery that Chinese art as The known to Europeans is most attractive. The bronze industry is closely connected with sculpture, for it is the extreme skill of the enameling is done as the same work is done in modeler which has made the Chinese bronzes Europe; the substance, a kind of soft glass, is famous. Vases are preserved which are undoubt- ground fine, mixed with some viscous material, edly two thousand years old; but the production and applied with the brush to the surface to be A covered. This, put into the enameling furnace, of large and small pieces has never ceased. which is not of very great heat, fuses and then little figure four inches high, as of a priest or a worshiper, will be full of movement and energy, hardens completely, producing, as the decorative ficial adornment. The custom in China is to use and of pathetic or humorous expression; and in artist wishes, an opaque or a translucent superlike manner the basin of a fountain six feet across and half as deep will be a single casting, what is known as the cloisonné method (see ENAMEL), and in carrying out the designs in this perfectly formed and flawless. to an extent much exceeding the practice of the material the Chinese use strong and vivid colors Chinese are the greatest masters of chromatic Japanese or other Eastern nations. In fact, the effect in pure strong color-dark and light blue, dark and bright red, green of two or three tints, dark yellow, light yellow, and the golden effect given by the metallic edge, which may be of brass or may be gilded-all these go to make up a color succeed in so well as do the Chinese. harmony which the workmen of no other nation APPLIED ARTS. In China the arts of molding and baking clay and of adorning the objects so made by painting is of unknown antiquity, but pieces exist which can with safety be dated The famous and several hundred years B.C. peculiarly Chinese discovery of porcelain (q.v.), than pottery made which is nothing more a peculiar from a peculiar clay and with glaze, although claimed by Chinese authorities for an epoch many hundred years B.C., cannot be definitely fixed before A.D. 960, although there is no doubt that it was known before that time. From that time on till the Fourteenth Century it is thought that decoration in color was applied only in the glaze covering the whole surface or large parts of the surface; but, of course, no such assertion can be verified. During the Ming Dynasty, beginning in 1368, the full glory of Chinese painted decoration on ceramic ware, and especially on porcelain, was reached. The method of decoration is briefly this: upon the partly baked or slightly baked body of the piece, painting is done in one of several shades of blue, that being the only color which will bear the heat of the furnace to which it is to be exposed. This being fired, the glaze is applied over the blue painting, and the piece may then be finished. It is, however, common to paint the piece again, upon the glaze, with enamel colors, that is to say, colors which will fuse at a much lower heat than that of the original and the later firing already described, and which, moreover, are more or less translucent in their nature. Thus a fine Chinese bowl will have two systems of decoration combined into one polychromatic design, the blue shows through the glaze and acts as the outline or skeleton of the design, and upon this and mingled with it is an elaborate pattern in red, green, yellow, each of several tints. This pattern is graded not only by the difference in the color, but also by the amount of heat to which it has been exposed, and again, by the greater or less thickness of the coat or bed of semi-translucent color through which the bluish white surface of the glaze itself is seen. To persons who have studied other ceramic arts of great importance, and especially the art of Persia, the painted 'overglaze' decoration of even the finest Chinese vases and tiles seems hard. The outlines are uncompromising; the flower is raised a little above the smooth surface around it, and its edge leaves no doubt as to the place of beginning of the colored surface which stands for a petal or leaf. This, in con Somewhat the same merit is seen in their textile fabrics, especially in their silk-weaving. Many processes are used and the weaves are sometimes extremely elaborate, as in the case of velvet with pile upon pile (see VELVET), and in those curious figured and flowered silks in the threads which form one part of the pattern which there is a decided break or opening between and those of another part or of the background. Embroidery in the hands of the Chinese is as it were an enlargement of the field of textile fabric, for it is used continually to help out and make still more decorative a piece which, as it leaves the weaver's hands, is already very rich. During the recent centuries of decay and collapse the arts of China have suffered a great eclipse, and it has seemed at times as if no more fine porcelain or enamel was, or would be, produced. But even in our own time there has been a marked increase in the number of exports of such fine wares, and although these are apt to be copies of ancient work, there is nothing except European commercial influence to prevent a rebirth of native art. BIBLIOGRAPHY. The most important work by a European on the arts of China is Bushell, Oricntal Ceramic Art: Collection of W. T. Walters (New York, 1889), an expensive folio which contains many excellent chromo-lithographs. Monkhouse, A History and Description of Chinese Porcelain (New York, 1901), to which Dr. Bushell has also contributed, is valuable, both for its text and its illustrations, although it lacks unity. After that of Dr. Bushell, the most important work on Chinese pottery and porcelain is Grandidier, La céramique chinoise (Paris, 1894). Gulland, Chinese Porcelain (London, 1898). gives interesting descriptions, but shows an inadequate comprehension of the significance of Chinese art. It is illustrated from photographs. More truthful than photographs in some ways are the admirable etchings by Jules Jacquemart, in Jacquemart and Le Blant, Histoire de la porcelaine (Paris, 1862). Paléologue, L'art chinois (Paris, 1888), one of a set of the Bibliothèque de l'enseignement des beaux-arts, is a convenient handbook. The special excellence of Chinese artists, their great ingenuity and taste in producing surface ornamentation in color, is well exemplified in Owen Jones, Examples of Chinese Ornament (London, 1867). William Anderson, in his Catalogue of Japanese and Chinese Paintings in the British Museum (London, 1886), and in the elaborately illustrated work The Pictorial Arts of Japan (London, 1886), deals with Chinese pictorial art in color and in monochrome. Chinese architecture in the strict sense has hardly been treated by Europeans. There are several essays scantily illustrated in the Publications of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Lon. don, 1866-67, 1873-74, and 1895). The Dictionary of Architecture of the Architectural Publication Society of London, Vol. II. (published about 1865), contains an essay on Chinese architecture which summarizes the small amount of knowledge then existing. The separate paragraphs are signed by different writers, but the name of the editor is not given. There is little of more recent date. Choisy, in his Histoire de l'architecture (Paris, 1899), has given a short but trustworthy analysis of Chinese methods of building, and of the resulting architectural effect. Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire de l'habitation humaine (Paris, 1875), though with a more popular treatment, shows an almost equal understanding of the earliest construction in bamboos and round timber of small scantling. Cram, in the Dictionary of Architecture and Building (New York, 1901-02), has summed up accurately what is really known of Chinese architecture, and his article on Japan in the same work continues the subject. CHINESE EMPIRE (Fr. Chine, Med. Lat. China, Ar. Sin, Pers. Chin, Skt. Cina; Gk., for the people, Zival, Sinai, Zîpes, Seres, Lat. Seres; Turk. Khatai, Mongol. Kitat, whence Engl. Cathay, Russ. Kitai, from the race, generally held to be Tungusic, of Kitan, or Khitan, who ruled in the north of China from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century: the natives call their country ChungKwo, Midland,' poetically Chung-Hwa, Flower of the Middle.' or Ta-Tsing-Kwo, 'Realm of the Great Light,' an appellation applied to the empire in toto, and one which shows the origin of the word China). An imperial domain extending over most of the southeastern third of Asia, and embracing the whole area of continental drainage into the Pacific south of the Amur River, with the exception of Indo-China. It has an estimated area of about 4,225,000 square miles, and an estimated population of 400,000,000 souls. It is irregularly circular in shape, lying between latitudes 18 and 54° N. and longitudes 74° and 135° E.; and it includes, besides China proper and Tibet, Eastern Turkestan, Mongolia, and Manchuria. These dependencies are described under their names, and need here only a few words. Tibet is an elevated, cold, and largely sterile plateau, surrounded by lofty mountains; and Eastern Turkestan is an elevated and almost waterless basin (the Tarim) northwest of Tibet. Its northern border is the gigantic Tian Shan range. An area of elevated desert plateaus (including the Desert of Gobi, or Shamo) north of Tibet and China proper is known as Mongolia (or Sungaria at its western end). It is bounded on the east by the north and south Khingan Mountains, between which and the coast lies Manchuria. All of these regions are habitable only in limited districts, and support a scattered native population under the nominal control of China; while they represent in space two-thirds of the Chinese Empire, they amount hardly to a tenth of its population or resources, the other nine-tenths belonging to China in the common and restricted meaning of the term. CHINA PROPER. This is the compact, roughly quadrangular area forming the southeastern third of the empire, extending from the coast (some 2500 miles in length) westward to the lofty and crowded mountain ranges that form the eastern border of the Tibetan Plateau, and northward to the southern border of Mongolia. The only artificial boundary is the comparatively short one between China and Tongking. The total area of China proper is estimated at about 1,500,000 square miles, or about one-third of that of the whole empire, and within this area is included all but three or four per cent. of the total population of the Chinese Empire. The whole circuit of the land frontier (about 4500 miles) consists of almost impassable mountains and deserts, which from remote antiquity have effectually cut off this corner of the world from interchange of people, products, and ideas with other regions and races; from this physical isolation have arisen most of the peculiarities characteristic of Chinese civilization and manner of thought. The vast mountains and plateaus between China and Tibet cover a wide area, and send many spurs eastward and southward, especially into northcentral China, where the Kuen-lun is prolonged eastward in two lines, which diminish to hills toward the coast, but rise again in the Shantung Peninsula. Similarly, the Himalayas are continued across the southern part of China in reduced and broken lines of elevation, and this prolongation then sweeps northward in the promi nent range which reaches from Canton to Ningpo, outside of which is the coast region of Fukien. Southwestward of all lie the heights that form the northern backbone of Indo-China. These primary east-and-west lines of mountains divide China into three great valleys. The southernmost, south of the Himalayan extensions, is that of the Si-kiang, which drains the two Kwang provinces into the sea at Macao. North of its watershed between the Himalayan extensions and the central Kuen-lun extensions lies the valley of the Yang-tse-kiang, which is the most densely populated, highly cultivated, and important part of the whole empire. This mighty river, exceeding 3000 miles in length, originates in central Tibet, and flows through hundreds of miles of self-eroded mountain valley, leading first eastward, then southward to northern Yun-nan, then northeastward through the cañons of the Province of Sze-chuen, until it finally reaches the plains and traverses them to the Yellow Sea. It has many names, but all recognize it as Ta-kiang great river.' As far up as Hankow-Wu-chang (500 miles) it may be navigated by ocean steamers; still farther, 363 miles up to I-chang, by smaller vessels. There the gorges begin, and further navigation is by handboats, which often must be hauled along the bank. Like all snowfed rivers, the Yang-tse-kiang is subject to sudden floods, which often amount to 50 feet as far down as Hankow; a resultant compensation, however, is the constant renewal of fertility to the |