Persian Influence on Chinese Art from the Eighth to the Fifteenth Centuries

British Institute of Persian Studies

Persian Influence on Chinese Art from the Eighth to the Fifteenth CenturiesAuthor(s): Basil GraySource: Iran, Vol. 1 (1963), pp. 13-18Published by: British Institute of Persian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4299539 .

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13

PERSIAN INFLUENCE ON CHINESE ART FROM THE EIGHTH TO THE FIFTEENTH CENTURIES

By Basil Gray

The two great centres of design in Asia are Persia and China. Each has its own strong tradition. From time to time they have influenced one another, and these mutual influences have provided useful stimulus towards fresh achievements in both countries.

Hitherto much more attention has been paid to the influence of Chinese art in Persia than of the reverse movement, but certain specific instances of the influence of Persia on the arts of the T'ang dynasty have been noted and admitted. Such are the bronze mirrors decorated on the reverse with a design of lions among vines;' and glazed pottery ewers with Sasanian motifs, horsemen or rosettes, in relief on the sides,2 which were made as cheap substitutes for silver vessels for burial in the tombs. These begin from the first years of the dynasty (A.D. 68-90o6).

In the seventh century and earlier the main route by which such influences travelled was the land route through Central Asia, the old " silk route " by which China sent her silks to the Roman West. All the countries along the route profited from this international trade. The route was so long and transport by it so costly that only luxury goods were exchanged. East-bound goods were mainly the precious metals, but glass seems to have ranked nearly as highly in Chinese eyes. The discovery of a merchant's store-room at Begram in Afghanistan has shown that Chinese lacquer was imported and that the exports from the Mediterranean included decorative stucco reliefs and glass.3 By about A.D. 6oo, Sasanian motifs were being used to decorate green-glazed celadon ware at a kiln in Shantung in North-east China. It was made for home consumption and not for export, and therefore witnesses to the Chinese taste for Persian art.

This taste for foreign, Western art was characteristic of the T'ang period with its expansionist mentality and successful political penetration of Central Asia. Indian influence was naturally felt in the arts of Buddhist centres, but the Persian influence which accompanied it is equally strikingly to be seen in many media.

The red background in wall-painting, and the decorative use of the pearl-border, both of Sasanian origin, are universal in the Buddhist cave temples at Tun-huang5, the last place in China on the route towards the West, in the sixth and early seventh centuries.

Before the Arab conquest of Persia, this trade by the overland route to China must have been on a comparatively small scale, but in the eighth century it greatly expanded, owing to the increase in Chinese power and interest in foreign trade; and to the improved basis for international trade provided by the Abbasid gold currency. Silver coins from Byzantium and the Sasanian Empire have been found in sixth-century tombs at Chang-an the T'ang capital; but now after A.D. 695 the coinage of the Caliphs was the international means of exchange throughout the old world.6

Equally important was the building of ocean-going ships in China, which began to appear in the Persian Gulf in the eighth century. The earliest deep-water port seems to have been Siraf, present-day Bandar Tahiri, due south of Shiraz, which was predominant in commerce in the ninth century, and did not decline until after an earthquake in 977 and the fall of the Buyids.7 From the early tenth I W. P. Yetts, The George Eumorfopoulos Collection: Catalogue of

the Chinese and Corean Bronzes, vol. 2, 1930, pls. XXI-XXIII. 2 Sekai Toji Zenshu (Catalogue of World Ceramics), vol. 9,

1956, pls. 56, 57- Heibonsha Ceramic Series, vol. 25, I96I, pls. 2, 3.

3 Dldgation Archiologique Franfaise en Afghanistan. Tome IX, 1939. J. Hackin: Recherches Arch6ologiques a Begram.

4 Basil Gray, Early Chinese Pottery and Porcelain, 1953, pl. 13. - Basil Gray, Buddhist Cave Paintings at Tun-huang, 1959, pl. 2 1. ' H. A. R. Gibb, " Chinese Records of the Arabs in Central

Asia ". Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, vol. II, No. 4.

On the importance of Sirif as a port for overseas trade, see Jean Aubin: " La ruine de SIrAf et les routes du Golfe Persique aux XIe et XIIe siecles " (Cahiers de Civilisation Mididvale: II, No. 3, 1959, Universit6 de Poitiers, Centre d'Etudes Sup6rieurs de civilisation m6di6vale). L. Vanden Berghe, " R6centes d6couvertes de monuments Sassanides dans le Fars "; Iranica Antiqua, vol. I, Leiden, 196 I. On the present appearance of the site, see M. Aurel Stein, Archaeological Reconnaissance in .North Western India and South Western Iran, I937, pp. 202-212.



14 JOURNAL OF PERSIAN STUDIES

century, Old Ormuz, on an inlet on the Kirman coast, became a centre for trade to India and China." Its rival was Kays or Kish, which finally took the lead in the twelfth century with its secure island site.

This sea route was given impetus by the virtual severance of the land route for nearly Ioo years between 763 and 851 by the Tibetan conquests in Central Asia.9 At the same time the attraction of the Persian Gulf trade was enhanced by the foundation of Baghdad in 752, and the rise of Basra and Samarra on the Tigris to be centres of luxury production and consumption.

On the Chinese side foreign trade began to be organized by the growing communities of foreign merchants in her ports, of which the chief in the eighth century were Cantonxo and Yang-chou, which

lay on the Grand Canal, completed in 605, connecting the Yang-tze valley with the Yellow River." These communities were big enough to be placed under the administration of local Moslem chiefs and to threaten the Chinese inhabitants, who replied with vigour. These difficulties did not affect the trade which continued to expand. The Chinese were interested in the import of horses, amber, glass, silver vessels and copper and silver ingots; mother of pearl and rhinoceros horn.1'

A quite different movement led to the diffusion of Persian influence in Central Asia and China: the settlement of Zoroastrian refugees from the Moslem conquerors. By the eighth century their communities were strong enough to be granted the recognition of official status in Ch'ang-an and Loyang, the two capitals of China under the T'ang. In the ninth century a branch of the Uighur Turks settled down in Turfan, where for 500 years they became the most cultured and advanced people of Central Asia, while they were mainly Manichaean and their culture largely Iranicised.'3 There were also persistent Manichaean groups in China, especially in the south-east coastal provinces of Chekiang and Fukien. All these circumstances favoured Chinese contacts with Persian culture, and made possible the strong influence which it exercised in these centuries: so much so that Western lands were collectively known as Po-se or Parsa, which is clearly Fars(i). The westerners in Canton were known as Ta-chi, which is of the same root, being the name in use from early times for the peoples of western Asia known by the land route.

With this picture of the background, we can now look at the evidence which we have for the penetration of Persian art forms into China.

Patterned woven silks. Sir Aurel Stein recovered from the Buddhist cave temples near Tun-huang small pieces of figured brocade which were used or intended for the mounting strips round Buddhist pictures. These have been in the British Museum for over forty years, but have only recently been identified by Miss Dorothy Shepherd of the Cleveland Museum as belonging to a small group which she has shown to be the work of a suburb of Bukhara, known as Zandana, which were then famous as Zandaniji.'4 They were produced when this area was under Sogdian rule, before the Arab conquest which did not come here until A.D. 728. The importance of the British Museum fragments is two-fold; first they are practically unfaded, unlike the larger pieces which survive because they were used for wrapping relics in Christian churches; and secondly because they had been exported to China. Moreover, with them were found Chinese weavings which are clearly derived as copies of the Persian- style originals from Sogdia, where the Sasanian tradition was maintained. They show confronted lions and rams within circles of leaves or pearls. The Chinese copies also show confronted beasts; ducks or stags, while a third design shows a winged griffin, also within a circle. The colouring of these pieces is in the same range as the Zandaniji group; dark blue, orange, pink, and a special light green; unlike other Chinese silks of the period. Similar silks, either original Persian or Chinese copies of them are represented in the silk clothes painted on the clay figures in the same cave temples at Tun-huang.'5 8 L. Lockhart, Persian Cities, 1960, p. 172. G. Le Strange, The

Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, 1905, PP. 318-32 x. 9 V. V. Barthold, Turkestan down to the Mongol Invasions, Oxford, 1928.

10 Ahbar al-sin wa'l hind, ed. Sauvaget, p. 6. C. E. Bubler, " Alte Arabische Berichte fiber den fernen Osten ". Asiatische Studien VIII, pp. 51-69, Bern, 1954. 11 E. O. Reischauer, " Notes on T'ang Dynasty Sea Routes ". Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 5, 1940, pp. 142-164.

11 Huduid al-'Alam (composed in 982), translated and explained by V. Minorsky, 1937.

13 F. S. Drake, " History of the Uighurs ", in Chinese Recorder, Nov. 1940, p. 676 et seq.

14 Dorothy Shepherd and W. B. Henning, " Zandaniji identified ? " in Aus der Welt der Islamischen Kunst. Festschrift fiir Ernst Kiihnel, 1959, pp. 15-41.

x1 Basil Gray, Buddhist Cave Paintings pl. 33.



Pl. Ia. Engraved silver-gilt ewer. Chinese: T'ang dynasty. Ht. g-g9 ins. (50-6 cm.). Tokyo National Museum.



Pl. Ib. Yiieh ware bowl on high foot. Chinese: T'ang dynasty. Ht. 4- ins. (II-43 cm.). Mrs. Alfred Clark Collection, England.

Pl. Ic. Porcelain bowl with pale blue glaz. Chinese: Tenth-eleventh century. Ht. 2 ins. (5'3 cm.).

Mr. B. Z. Seligman Collection, London.



Pl. IIb. Pottery dish painted in cobalt blue and turquoise. Persian: Early Thirteenth century. D. 10o3 ins. (26.16 cm.).

British Museum.

Pl. Ila. Stoneware vase, painted in black under a turquoise glaze. Chinese: T'sii chou ware: Tiian dynasty (128o-1368). Ht. o.-7 ins. (27-7 cm).

Br itish Museum.



Pl. IIIa. Reverse of Chinese blue and white porcelain dish from Ardabil. Tehra'n Archaeological Museum. Fourteenth century. D.

22•- ins. (57-.5 cm.).

Pl. IIIb. Blue and white porcelain dish. Chinese: Fourteenth century. D. I9g

ins. (48.9 cm.). Fogg Museum, Harvard University.



PERSIAN INFLUENCE ON CHINESE ART 15

This type of Sasanian motif remained in vogue for centuries in Iran itself; as in the embossed decoration of a brass ewer of the eighth century with Senmurv on the two sides,le or in the confronted ducks on a Rayy pottery dish of the twelfth century."7

The silks probably went by the overland route to China; the metalwork mostly by sea. But a group of gold ewer and cups was found in South Russia at Poltava, the shapes typical of the Sasanian period.'8 Both ewer and cup were imitated in China in silver versions; the first is now preserved in the National Museum, Tokyo, to which it was removed from the Horyuji temple where it had been for many centuries.19 On the body are engraved winged horses also in Sasanian style; but the dragon cover is in purely Chinese taste. The second shape has been more modified to suit Chinese taste in the silver cups exemplified in several western collections, of which the Sedgwick cup in London is one.20 This has a deeper bowl than the Persian prototype, and the engraved decoration is purely Chinese, but the stem is little changed and the general form is easily recognized.

The influence of Persian gold and silverware in T'ang China was greater than this; the shapes were also copied in porcelain, in both the green Yuieh celadon21 and the white ware which may have been made in the same district of northern Chekiang.22 The site of the Ytieh kilns is at Shao-hsing on the south side of the bay of Hangchow from which the port of Yang-chou was easily accessible by the Grand Canal.23 Yiieh ware was shipped from there and has been found on western sites, but the

shapes imitating Persian silver were made not for export, but for the home market.

White porcelain was a speciality of the Hsing and later the Ting kilns of North China, but it was also made in Kiangsi and this was probably the origin of the white porcelain sherds found on the

ninth-century site of the palace of Samarra on the Tigris.24 Whole pieces, preserved in China until

recently and now in Western collections, show the influence of Persian metalwork in many of the most typical and successful shapes of this white porcelain, with their cusped sides, high foot, and foliate

lips.25 In one case the shape can be closely paral! led in western glass; and glass may sometimes have been the medium of influence rather than directly metalwork. The lobed cup is one of the favourite Sasanian silver shapes, but occurs also in early Islamic glass in Persia, as in an example in the Corning Museum of Glass, lately exhibited in Paris.26

It is probable that the greater part of the foreign trade of China was not carried through to the west in a single ship, but transhipped at entrep6ts en route. Kollam in South Malabar27 has been mentioned as one, and another has lately been identified on the peninsular coast of Siam, on an island called Kakao at Takuapa. Here Alastair Lamb, of the University of Kuala Lumpur, Malaya,28 has found a mass of Chinese pottery sherds with a small amount of Islamic pottery and glass, which strongly suggests a trading settlement, where the Persian and Arab seamen took over the cargoes from the

Chinese ships. These remains continue till about the eleventh century; and other evidence suggests a break, almost complete, in this trade with the West at about this time. The decline of the Caliphate

put an end to Moslem economic domination in the eleventh century, while Sung policy in China was

generally opposed to overseas trade. Certainly the Chinese taste of that time was far less receptive to

foreign ideas, and patterns were, instead, based upon the ancient traditions of China.

The Mongol conquest brought a great change; and the routes across Central Asia were re-opened to the Moslem merchants. Ch'fian-chou (the Zaiton of Marco Polo) became the principal port for the

16 R. Pinder-Wilson, " An Islamic Ewer in Sassanian Style ".

British Museum Quarterly vol. XXII, I960. 17 A. U. Pope, Survey of Persian Art, V, pl. 60o4B. 18 D. Talbot Rice,

" The Third International Congress and Exhibition of Iranian Art and Archaeology, Leningrad, 1935," in Ars Islamica, vol. III, 1936, p. 99, fig. 1.

1s Treasures Originally from Horyfiji, Tokyo National Museum, 1959, pls. 200-202. (PLATE IA.)

2o B. Gyllensvird, " T'ang Gold and Silver ", Bulletin of Far Eastern Antiquities, No. 29, 1957, pl. 17A.

21 Basil Gray, Early Chinese Pottery and Porcelain, pl. i5A. (PLATE ixB.)

22 ib., pl. 22A. 23 See note 11x above. 24 F. Sarre, Die Keramik von Samarra, Berlin, 1925.

2s G. Lindberg, Hsing-yao and Ting-yao, Bulletin of the Museum

of Far Eastern Antiquities, No. 25, Stockholm, 1953. (PLATE

iC.) s6 Glass from the Ancient World: The Ray Winfield Smith

Collection, Corning Museum of Glass, 1957, No. 532. 27 Ahbar al-sin wa'l-hind, p. 7: Ibn Battiita. 28 A. Lamb, " Kedah and Takuapa: Some Tentative Historical

Conclusions ", in Federation Museums Journal, Kuala Lumpur,

vol.,V.I, N.S., i96 , pp. 69-88.




Western trade.29 Its extent in the thirteenth century may be judged from the fortune that the Moslem family of P'u made through the perquisites of the office of Superintendant of the Trading Ships Office.30 The exports were mainly silks and porcelain.

The porcelain was of three main kinds; celadon, white wares, and blue and white, painted under the glaze.

Some of the celadon dishes were of great size, suited rather for the pilaw of the Moslem world than for Chinese use, but otherwise the celadon was not affected by foreign influence. It continued the old Chinese tradition of monochrome porcelain. But the underglaze blue was a fresh development, unprecedented in China except for the brush painted Tz'i-chou pottery. Even among these Tz'ti-chou wares, there was a break between the all-over floral patterns of Sung, or the sketchy spray, and the pictorial subjects and partitioned layout of the Yuan Tz'i-chou with cartouche panels.31

It is now established that the early supplies of cobalt required for the underglaze blue wares were imported to China from Persia, where it was mined near Kashan.32 In fact it had been used in Persia long before this for pottery decoration, as for instance in the typical Kashan pieces painted with floral designs in blue and black,32 a or with blue stripes radiating from the centre, under a colourless glaze. These had been made from the early years of the thirteenth century, as for instance a bowl in the British Museum dated A.D. I214.33 It looks as though the idea of painting designs in the cobalt under the glaze may have travelled to China with the cobalt.34 This kind of painted pottery was in use in Persia at the time of the Mongol invasions.

The idea would have been transmitted by the Moslem merchants; for no one would have thought of exporting the brittle Persian pottery to China to compete with the fine porcelain there. We have seen that the export trade by sea was under their supervision; they may well have been in a position to control the orders to the kilns, which were around the future great pottery centre of Ching Te-chen. The dishes which were exported were even larger than any celadon, up to 25 ins. (63.5 cm.) in dia. The elements of the designs are purely Chinese, but the arrangement is in zones and panels, and repeat patterns are frequent.

It has hitherto been denied that Persia can have had anything to contribute to this decor; but fresh evidence has come to light which may lead to a modification of this view. On the back of one of the big fourteenth-century dishes from the Ardabil collection, now in the Tehran Museum, is the name Husain.followed by a word which seems to be " haqir ".3* A dish of the same type and period but of different design, acquired in India in the nineteenth century by a British engineer, has recently been given to the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, by Mr. Richard Hobart. Incorporated into the main design on the face of this dish is an inscription, not easy to decipher but probably reading " Hasan ", again followed by the word " haqir ".36 Both these inscriptions must have been written at the same time that the dishes were decorated, since they are both under the glaze and in the same cobalt pigment as the rest of the painting. In the second case the design of petals has been modified to make room for this inscription, which must therefore have been envisaged when the pattern was drawn out. What is the significance of this discovery ? Since the humble suffix would exclude the names from being those of patrons, for whom the dishes could have been made, they must refer either to the merchants handling the orders or to the potters who decorated these dishes. The latter would be unusual for two reasons; first, there is no acknowledgment of authorship prefixed to the names, such as " amal "; and secondly, it would be unprecedented in Chinese ceramics to find a signature on the front of a piece of porcelain. 29 D. Howard Smith, " Zaitdn's Five Centuries of Sino-foreign

Trade ", Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1958, pts. 3-4. G. Ecke and P. Demi6ville, The Twin Pagodas of Zayton, 1935-

30 Kuwabara, TTyo Bunko, No. 7, 1935: cf. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, I, 1936, pp. 265-7. Marco Polo, ed. Yule, pp. 238-9.

31 e.g. Basil Gray, Early Chinese Pottery and Porcelain, pl. 59. (PLATE IIA.)

s' H. M. Garner, Oriental Blue and White, p954, p.2. Arthur Lane, Later Islamic Pottery, 1957, p.22.

32A PLATE IIB.

3s A. U. Pope, Survey of Persian Art, vol. V, pl. 734B. 34 Arthur Lane, O.C.S. Transactions, vol. 30. The Arts of The

Ming Dynasty, 1950, p. 26. 36 John A. Pope, Chinese Porcelains from the Ardebil Shrine, pl. 2o,

1956. (PLATE IIIA.) 36 PLATE IIIB.



PERSIAN INFLUENCE ON CHINESE ART 17

At Chiian-chou there are a number of carved tomb-stones of the Moslem community.37 They are carved with Arabic inscriptions in a peculiar style, just as the inscriptions on the dishes are written in a peculiar hand. It appears that this community lived a remote and isolated life far from contacts with their original homes in the West, and after generations were in many respects quite Sinicised. Is it possible that this community played an important part in the development of the underglaze blue

(and red) wares of Ching-te-chen ?

There is no doubt that in the early Ming dynasty, in the reigns of Yung-lo and Hsiian-te, some of the finest quality blue and white was made in the shape of Persian metalwork objects, although decorated in an entirely Chinese style.38 But this is easily explained, for it was the Moslem eunuchs who were the intimate personal advisers of the Yung-lo emperor and who advised and carried out the series of seven expeditions by sea to the west in search of jewels and other treasures.39 Cheng-ho, who was the commander of all these voyages, was a Moslem eunuch. The first was in 1405-7, and the sixth, and last under Yung-lo, was in 1421-3. A seventh followed after an interval, in 1431-3, under Hsiian-te. All reached Calicut on the Malabar coast of India, which was then an entrep6t; but only the fourth and fifth voyages of 14I3-5 and 1417-9 got as far as Ormuz, which was by now transferred from the mainland to an island. These expeditions were on a huge scale, with Ioo ships measuring up to 44 chang or I43 m. in length; and they carried, it is said " 27,000 soldiers ", who were regular troops from the frontier force who alone were liable for foreign service.40 But they were commercial

voyages, in search of jewels and other rarities. At this time the foreign goods for sale in Ormuz included

rubies, balas rubies, emeralds, pearls, coral, amber, and jade, and embroidered velvet. The Chinese took silks and porcelain to sell, and they returned with perfumes, gems and strange beasts, all luxuries. These voyages were extremely costly but no doubt provided the emperor with much information about the outer world, its geography and products. Had the policy of Yung-lo been pursued it might never have been possible for the Portuguese, and later, other western countries to gain control of the carrying trade of the East. But the jealousy of the Confucian officials was roused, especially by the independent command of troops gained by Cheng-ho and they succeeded in stopping the voyages; and later in

destroying the official reports of them in the imperial chancery, so that no full account survives.

Still, it is known that Hung-Wu (1369-99), the first Ming emperor, established a shipyard for

building large ocean-going ships at his capital Nanking4' and sent embassies to the Chola king of Coromandel in 1369-70. For some sixty years, with a short interval on the death of Yung-lo in 1425, there was a concerted drive to improve trade between China and the West. There was response from the other side; the King of Ormuz sent embassies to the Chinese court (no doubt they were really merchants) in 1414, 1432 and

1434. Meanwhile, with the appearance of Timur and his conquests in Central Asia, the land contact

between Persia and China, which had been interrupted by the fall of the Yikan in. 1368, was strongly renewed. There were eight embassies from Persia and Transoxiana to China and seven from China to the Timurid princes between 1387 and 1432.42 They were interrupted for seven years between 1398 and Timur's death in 1405 by his plan to invade China and imprisonment of Chinese envoys. The

largest embassy was that of 1420-21 in which Shah Rukh and his sons Ulugh Beg and Baysunghur participated.

In early fifteenth-century Chinese porcelain we may see the quite frequent use of a pattern of

pendent cartouches surrounding symmetrically the mouth of a shouldered prunus vase or of a jar.

37 John Foster, Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, April 1954. Wu Wen-liang, Ch'iian Chou Tsung Chiao Shih k'o, Academia Sinica, Peking, 1957, pls. 1-26.

38 Basil Gray, O.C.S. Transactions, vol. 18, 1942 " The Influence

of Near Eastern Metalwork in Chinese Ceramics ".

39 J. J. L. Duyvendak, " Ma Huan Re-examined ", in Ver. der Kon Akad. Van Wette. Amsterdam, XXXII, 1933. P. Pelliot, " Les Grands Voyages maritimes chinois au d6but du XVe siecle ", T'oung-pao, ser. II, vol. 30, 1933.

J. J. L. Duyvendak, " The True Dates of the Chinese Maritime Expeditions in the early fifteenth century". T'oung-pao, II, vol. 34, 1938.

40 Pao Tsen-peng, On the Ships of Cheng-ho. National Historical Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 1961.

41 Chou Shih-te, " Notes on the great ships of Cheng Ho, a discussion based on a study of the tiller found at the site of a Ming Dynasty shipyard ", in Wen Wu, 1962, No. 3.

42 V. V. Barthold, Four Studies in the History of Central Asia, vol. II. Ulugh-Beg, 1958, pp. 109-I I2, 179-181.




This has been compared with the similar pattern used on Chinese official robes, where it is known as the " Cloud collar ", and supposed to have cosmic significance.43 All patterns of this kind seem to derive from roof or tent patterns where they would surround the centre which might be thought of as the pole. Such patterns are indeed found on the tents depicted in early Timurid miniatures of the first quarter of the fifteenth century.44 Moreover, the pattern can be seen on Persian dress design in the Jala'ir period at Tabriz about 1360-74;45 so that it could have been introduced at the same date into Persia and China by the Mongols. It was apparently known under the Chin dynasty (II22-1234) in royal robes; and so may have been long endemic in Mongolia.43

The pilgrim flask was probably one of the shapes borrowed by the Chinese from the West before the T'ang dynasty; for it is a common form of Parthian and Sasanian pottery, but it was certainly revived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in several different forms. One of these with undeniable Persian connections has the sides decorated with strap-work based on a hexagonal star, which is clearly an Islamic metal form. A flask from East Persia in the British Museum inlaid with silver on bronze is probably a late survival of the metal prototype.

The early fifteenth century was the period when Islamic metal had its greatest influence in China; but occasionally thereafter instances appear, as in a tazza hexagonal in plan on a high foot which preserves the outline of metal shaped feet at the angles. The top is painted with the kind of Chinese brush picture which appealed to Persian taste, for there is a class of Persian pen drawing, probably of early fifteenth-century date, reflecting just such Chinoiserie.

If this then was suited to Persian taste as the shape also suggests, there is quite specific instance of catering for that market in a late sixteenth-century blue and white bottle to which enamel has been sparingly added near the foot. For in this place a quatrain from Hafiz is written.

If more is to be discovered about the range and dates of Chinese trade with Persia in the centuries discussed here, a hopeful line to follow would be an investigation of the sites on the Persian Gulf mentioned in my text above.

,1 S. Cammann, " Symbolism of the cloud collar motif ", in Art Bulletin, vol. 33, 1951. H. M. Garner, Oriental Blue and White, pls. 20-21.

" Basil Gray, Persian Painting (Skira), I96I, pp. 73, 103- "5 Basil Gray, "Die Kalila wa Dimna der Universitit

Istanbul ". Pantheon, 1933, heft. 9, Abb. I. 46 J.A. Pope, op. cit., pl. 136D.



Documents

Persian Influence on Chinese Art from the Eighth to the Fifteenth Centuries