Читать книгу Chinese Art - Stephen W. Bushell - Страница 9

The Yuan Dynasty (1280–1367) was established by Kublai Khan (1215–1294) a grandson of the great Mongol warrior, Genghis Khan. The Mongols annexed the Uigur Turks and destroyed the Tangut kingdom, swept over Turkestan, Persia, and the steppes beyond, ravaged Russia and Hungary, and even threatened the existence of Western Europe. China was completely overrun by nomad horsemen, its finances ruined by issues of an irredeemable paper currency, and its cities handed over to alien governors called darughas. A Chinese contemporary writer describes the ruin of the porcelain industry at Ching-tê Chên at this time by exorbitant official taxation, so that the potters were driven away from the old imperial manufactory there, to start new kilns in other parts of the province of Kiangsi.

Marco Polo is astonished at the riches and magnificence of the great Khan, who was really a ruler of exceptional power and made good use of his Chinese conquests. But the culture which surprised the Venetian traveller was pre-Mongolian, and its growth was due mainly to Chinese hands. Even the wonderful cane palace of Marco Polo was actually the old summer residence of the Sung emperors at Kaifeng Fu, in the province of Honan, which was dismantled and carried away piece by piece to be built up again in the park of the new Mongolian capital of Shangtu, outside the Great Wall of China.

The Mongolian era is responsible for some of the remarkable similarities that have been noticed in industrial art work of Western and Eastern Asia, which were then for the first time under the rule of the same house. Hulagu Khan is said to have brought a hundred families of Chinese artisans and engineers to Persia about 1256; and similarly, the earliest painted porcelain of China is decorated with panels of Arabic script pencilled in the midst of floral scrolls, strongly suggestive of Persian influence.