Marbled Sancai

Clay Folded Into Clay

Decoration usually comes last. A piece is shaped, fired, and then something is done to it — brushed on, trailed on, carved in. Marbled sancai is the other way round. The pattern is in the clay before the piece exists.

Two or more clays of different colours are laid down in alternating layers, folded and kneaded together until the colours run through one another, and only then shaped — usually thrown on a wheel. Then the vessel is glazed and fired, and the pattern comes out of the kiln already inside it.

There are two ways of doing this. In full-body marbling the whole vessel is made of the folded clay, so the figure runs right through the wall. In veneered marbling the marbled clay is sliced thin and laid onto a body of plain clay — thriftier, and easier to arrange into a picture.

Neither way is easy. Clays of different colours are clays of different compositions, and they do not shrink at the same rate in the kiln. The maker has to know how each one will move before the piece goes in, and even then a good share of the work cracks along the seam between the two. Historical pieces are small for a reason: the technique stayed rare in part because the success rate stayed low.

The idea behind it is older than the ceramic version. It came from lacquerware, where layers of coloured lacquer were built up and then cut back to bring out the pattern underneath; the Tang potters did the same thing with clay.

Three Names for One Technique

The craft carries three names in Chinese, and each one catches a different part of it.

Jiaotai, 绞胎 — "twisted body" — names the action and the thing it is done to. It is also written 搅胎, with a character that means to stir; the sound is the same. Jiaoni, 绞泥, "twisted clay", names the material instead of the body. And touhuaci, 透花瓷, says what the eye sees: the pattern shows through the porcelain.

That last name explains the craft to someone who has never seen it. Nothing is painted on the surface, so there is nothing to flake or wear away: the flower is not on the porcelain, it is the porcelain, showing through.

"Flower" here is the old word for a decorative figure — the same sense it carries in qinghua, 青花, "blue-and-white".

A Pattern That Cannot Be Painted On

"Marbled" is an English word borrowed from paper and stone, and it fits. The effect is the same as on a marbled endpaper or a slab of marble: a figure that nobody drew.

That is the point of the technique, and the reason a brush cannot imitate it. A painted pattern lives in a layer on the surface; a marbled pattern is a property of the material. Look at the base of a marbled piece, or at a chip on a rim, and the figure is still there — it runs through the thickness of the wall, because it is made of the clay rather than laid on it.

The figures the old potters aimed at were drawn from the world: wood grain, rosettes, water waves, drifting clouds. Under the Song the repertoire widened — feather patterns, matting, chrysanthemums — and the lines grew finer.

None of it could have been painted on. A painter can copy a flower. Nobody can paint wood grain that runs through the board.

The Technique Is Still Alive

Marbling was made through the Tang and the Song, and then it faded. By the Yuan the kilns had stopped producing it, and for centuries the craft survived only in pieces that had already been fired — in museum cases, and in the ground.

It was brought back in 2002, in Luoyang. Potters and researchers who worked in sancai took broken Tang marbled pieces unearthed in the city, studied how the layers of clay had been built and folded, and worked the method out again. That year they produced a marbled sancai vessel of a kind that had not been made for centuries.

The craft is still practised here. It is a small line and a difficult one, and the difficulty has not changed: two clays that shrink at different rates, fighting each other in the kiln, deciding piece by piece how much of the work will survive.

Marbled by Hand

There is one more thing to notice about a marbled piece, and it is the thing that makes the craft unlike any other.

Its pattern is not a picture of anything. It is not wood grain painted to look like wood. It is what happened when two clays were folded together by hand — a record of a movement, fixed by fire. Two pieces can be made the same size, the same shape, in the same colours, and still carry different figures, because the folding is done by a person and not by a mould.

Nothing was added to it. The pattern is what the piece is made of.

The marbled pieces we carry are listed, with their sizes and forms, on our marbled sancai page.