Reading a Piece of Sancai

The Glaze Moves on Its Own

A piece of sancai tells you how it was made before you know anything else about it. The colours have run into one another — green into amber, amber into cream — and the boundary between them is not a line but a zone: sometimes soft, sometimes marbled, now and then edged with a thin dark rim where one glaze pushed against the next.

None of that is brushwork. Sancai glaze is a low-temperature transparent glaze, and the official account of the craft says plainly what it does in the kiln: it melts, runs down naturally, and soaks into the glaze beside it. The colours on a finished piece are where the fire put them.

Once you know that, several things stop looking like accidents — the colour that thinned as it ran, the pool that gathered and went dark, the place where two glazes met and neither won. There is no painting here for them to be mistakes in. They are the record of a liquid moving downhill.

It also means that two pieces from the same mould will not come out identical. The glaze goes on by hand, and then it moves.

Before the Glaze Went On

Very little in sancai is one piece of clay from start to finish. A figure was built from separately made parts, joined while the clay was still soft enough to take a join — a head, a body, arms, whatever the design called for, each made on its own and then brought together. Large figures were moulded in sections and assembled once the parts had dried enough to hold their shape but were still workable. Small ones were simpler: two half-moulds pressed out and closed against each other.

Round vessels are a different case. Those were thrown on a wheel, and everything projecting from them — spouts, handles, lugs, feet, applied decoration — was moulded separately and attached.

Then the whole object was fired. The joins are clay against clay, and the firing is what makes them one body. A sancai figure is not a figure with its arms stuck on afterwards. It is a single fired object that was made in parts.

What the Glaze Never Reached

Turn the piece over. The base is usually left unglazed, and that bare patch is the most informative part of the object.

The body underneath is white — the craft uses a local white kaolin — and it fires dense and fine. Some pieces come out of the kiln a soft pink instead, because that batch of clay carried a little more iron than usual. On those, a potter may brush a layer of white slip over the body before glazing, to bring the surface back to white under the colour. A body that is already white does not need it.

Then there are the marks. On the rim of a vessel, or on the inside of its base, you may find a small group of scars — three of them, set apart from one another. These are where the piece rested in the kiln. Vessels were fired in stacks, held apart by clay supports, and wherever a support touched, the glaze could not close over the spot. On the pieces that have been examined, the count is three.

Cracks That Are Not Damage

Look closely at the glaze and you will find a fine mesh of lines across it. This is crackle — 开片 — and it comes from cooling. The glaze and the body beneath it do not contract at the same rate. The body has already been through one firing and holds its size; the glaze is still settling onto it. Something has to give, and it gives in hairlines.

The lines sit inside the glaze layer. The body underneath is intact. What you are looking at is the material answering the kiln.

The Face Is Painted, Not Glazed

If the piece is a figure, look at the face. On a sancai figure the head is deliberately kept out of the glaze, and it is the last part of the work to be finished.

After the glaze firing, the face is painted — brows, lips, hair — in pigment laid on the bare clay. Museum records put it in the materials line as "glaze and pigment": two different finishes on one object. The same division holds in the work made here today. The head stays out of the glaze, and is painted afterwards.

The reason is visible on the piece itself. A face under a glaze that runs would come out of the kiln with its features softened into the colours around it. The potters kept the two things apart — the body glazed, the face painted — and the difference shows the moment you look for it.

Look at a sancai piece this way and it stops being a surface. The glaze that moved, the base that stayed bare, the marks of the supports, the crackle that came with cooling, the face painted after the fire — these are not details around the object. They are how the object was made, still legible on it.

The sancai we carry is on our Tang sancai page. The rules for how pieces are described on this site are set out on our craft quality page.