Tang Sancai: The Three-Colour Glaze

Tang sancai — "Tang three-colour" — is the best-known ceramic of the Tang dynasty, and the name is also the thing most often read wrong.

"Three" Means Many

The misunderstanding starts with the number. 三, san, does not mean three colours here. In classical Chinese it works as a count word for "several" or "many", and that is how it is being used in the craft's name.

A sancai piece is built on a white body and covered with a multi-coloured glaze in which yellow, green and white dominate. Those three are why the name stuck. They are not a limit. The palette runs wider, and a single piece can carry several colours at once.

The craft itself belongs to a defined window. It began in the reign of Emperor Gaozong in the seventh century, reached its height in the Kaiyuan era, and declined in the middle and late Tang after the An Lushan rebellion disrupted the court and the economy that had supported it.

Which Metal Makes Which Colour

The colours come from metal oxides added to the glaze, and each metal has its own result.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is worth pausing on the third row. Cobalt blue was the rarest of them in Tang China — the mineral did not occur locally, it had to be brought in from outside, and the techniques for purifying it were not yet mature. A splash of blue on a three-colour piece therefore carries a history with it. We describe that route in more detail in our article on the Silk Road and the Grand Canal.

Two Firings

A three-colour piece is fired twice, and the order matters.

The first firing is the biscuit firing, at over 1,000 °C. It hardens the unglazed body into a durable white form. Only then is the glaze applied, and the piece goes back into the kiln for a second, cooler firing.

That second firing uses a low-temperature lead glaze. Lead oxide does the essential work here: it brings the melting point down far enough that the glaze fuses without disturbing the body underneath, which has already been fired once.

Sources differ on the exact temperature of that second firing — official accounts give it as around 900 °C in one place and around 800 °C in another. The principle is the same in both: a second firing cool enough to be safe for a body that has already been through a much hotter one.

Made for the Afterlife

Most Tang three-colour ware was not made to be used. It was made to be buried.

Sancai vessels and figures were tomb goods (mingqi), placed in graves for the dead to have in the next life. In the high Tang, including three-colour pieces in a burial became a mark of the deceased's status, and the rule of thumb was direct: the more pieces, and the larger they were, the higher the rank.

That is why the surviving objects are so often large, elaborate and impractical. They were never going to be carried, poured from, or stacked on a shelf. They were made to be looked at once, in a tomb, by people who judged the family by them.

Horses, Camels and the Silk Road

The figures the craft is remembered for are animals — above all horses and camels.

Both were symbols of the Silk Road, and both appear constantly in Tang burials from Luoyang. A camel is almost never shown alone. A groom leads it, and the groom is usually a foreigner — a man of the western regions. That pairing is the standard composition on a three-colour camel. Horses carried the same weight in Tang culture for a different reason: they were the empire's military strength, and the finest of them came from Central Asia along the same roads.

Luoyang's Tang tombs have produced the full range of the craft's output: tomb guardian beasts, heavenly kings, civil officials, warriors, mounted riders, camels and horses — alongside everyday vessels made in the same technique.

Why It Is Called "Luoyang" Sancai

The craft is also known as Luoyang sancai, and the official account of why is a single sentence: because large numbers of fine Tang three-colour pieces have been unearthed in Luoyang, the craft came to be known by the city's name as well.

That is the whole of it.

A Living Craft

In 2008, the firing technique of Tang sancai was entered in the second batch of China's national intangible cultural heritage list, under the number Ⅷ-94, with Luoyang as the applicant region.

The listing matters for a practical reason. It means the technique is treated as a living craft with named practitioners and a documented method, rather than as a historical curiosity to be studied and left in a case. The same kilns, the same two firings, the same oxide colours described above are still in use in the city today.

From Luoyang to Your Shelf

A three-colour piece is easy to appreciate once you know what you are looking at: a white body fired hard, then glazed and fired soft, in colours that come from four metals and a name that only sounds like it means three.

You can see the pieces themselves, and how they are made, on our Tang sancai page.