Tang Sancai: Three-Colour Pottery and the Fakes That Follow It

Stand a Tang tomb horse on a table and look at its legs rather than its face. The glaze comes down the body in runs of amber and green, pools in the folds of the saddle cloth, and then stops — raggedly, at a different height on each leg, well above the hooves. Below that line the clay is bare, pale and slightly powdery. The head is usually bare too, the eyes and mane painted on in pigment that has mostly gone. Nobody designed those stopping lines. They are what molten lead glaze does when it runs downhill in a kiln, and they are the first thing to look at on any piece offered as Tang sancai.

This guide walks you through what sancai is and how its colours were made, how a figure was built and fired, who the pieces were made for, what fourteen centuries underground do to a lead glaze, where the modern fakes came from and how they are made, what thermoluminescence testing can and cannot settle, and what to ask about provenance and export papers before you buy.

What sancai actually is

Sancai (三彩) means "three colours". The name is a convention rather than a count — pieces routinely carry two colours, and the best carry four or five. What defines the ware is the glaze chemistry, not the palette: a soft lead-fluxed glaze on a low-fired earthenware body, not a high-fired feldspathic glaze on stoneware or porcelain.

That distinction does most of the practical work. Lead glaze melts at a low temperature, runs freely, and stays soft enough to scratch with a steel point. It is also chemically vulnerable, which is why burial changes it so much. If you are unsure which family a piece belongs to, settle the body first, exactly as you would with pottery, stoneware and porcelain; everything else follows from the answer.

The ware belongs to the Tang dynasty (618–907), and the great production period is much narrower than that — roughly the late seventh century to the middle of the eighth. The trade in lavish tomb furnishings collapsed with the rebellion and civil war of the 750s and 760s, and sancai never recovered its earlier scale.

The palette and where the colours come from

The colours are metal oxides suspended in a clear lead glaze, laid on over a white slip that makes them read brightly against a body that is not truly white.

• Green. Copper. The most common colour, and the one that runs furthest.
• Amber, yellow and brown. Iron, at different concentrations and in different firing conditions. The warm caramel tone is the signature of the ware.
• Cream and white. No colourant at all — clear lead glaze over the white slip.
• Blue. Cobalt, and expensive. Tang blue came in from the west, the same long trade in cobalt ore that later supplied blue and white porcelain. Blue-glazed sancai is markedly scarcer than green and amber, and an unusually large proportion of pieces offered as Tang blue sancai are modern.
• Purple-brown and black. Manganese, used sparingly and mostly for detail.

The colours were applied wet, next to each other, and allowed to bleed at the boundaries in the firing. Controlled bleeding — a green feathering into an amber over a couple of millimetres, with a slightly raised edge where the two glazes met — is characteristic. Boundaries that are hard, even and printed-looking are not.

How a sancai figure was made

Most figures were press-moulded in two or more piece-moulds, luted together with slip, and finished by hand. Look inside an open base and you can often find the vertical join seams, the finger-smoothing over them, and the tool marks of whoever cleaned the piece up. Heads were frequently moulded separately and inserted into the neck, which is why heads and bodies are so easy to swap later.

The firing was in two stages. The body was biscuit-fired first at a relatively high earthenware temperature, then dipped or painted with glaze and fired again much cooler, around the temperature at which lead glaze matures. Two firings on a mould-made body left plenty of scope for distortion, and genuine figures are rarely perfectly symmetrical.

Faces were usually left unglazed. Skin, eyebrows, eyes, lips and sometimes elaborate hair ornaments were cold-painted after firing in unfired pigment, and that pigment has almost always worn away to ghosts. A Tang figure with a crisp, complete, brightly painted face is telling you something about the twentieth century, not the eighth.

Made for the tomb, not the table

Sancai is overwhelmingly mingqi (明器), goods made for burial. Lead glaze is not safe for food, and the ware was not domestic. What survives is the furniture of an elite funeral: horses, Bactrian camels and their foreign grooms, court ladies with the full faces and high coiffures of the period, standing officials in court dress, armoured lokapala guardian kings trampling demons, and grotesque earth spirits set at the tomb door.

Vessels exist too — tripod offering dishes, jars, pilgrim flasks, ewers with foreign profiles — and the shapes often follow metalwork from Central Asia and further west. Sancai is the most visibly cosmopolitan Chinese ceramic there is, which is a large part of its market appeal.

Size followed rank. Sumptuary rules limited the number and scale of figures by the rank of the deceased, and were repeatedly ignored by families who could afford to ignore them.

What burial does to a lead glaze

This is where most of the useful evidence sits, because burial alteration is slow and difficult to imitate convincingly.

• Crazing. Genuine sancai glaze is covered in a fine, dense, irregular craze network, usually tighter than the crackle on high-fired wares. The lines run into each other at varied angles and change scale where the glaze pools thickly.
• Iridescence and silvering. Lead glaze degrades underground into thin surface layers that refract light. The result is a faint rainbow sheen in raking light and, on some pieces, patches of dull silver or gunmetal where degradation went furthest. The effect sits within the glaze, not on it, and it is uneven — strongest where the piece lay against soil.
• Earth in the right places. Soil accretion collects in recesses, undercuts and craze lines, and it is difficult to remove entirely without damage. Even deposits spread over high points as well as low ones have been applied.
• Unglazed body condition. The bare clay below the glaze line and inside the base should be dry, absorbent and consistent in colour with any chip. Freshly broken clay looks different from clay that has been exposed for centuries.

Ultraviolet light is worth carrying. Restored joints, fills and overpaint fluoresce against the original surface, and sancai figures are restored more often than not — heads, hands, legs and tails are the usual repairs. The technique is the same one used for restoration and retouching on porcelain.

The fakes and where they came from

The modern history of sancai starts with railway construction near Luoyang in the early twentieth century, which cut through Tang cemeteries and put a large quantity of figures onto the market at once. Collectors in China, Japan, Europe and America bought heavily, prices rose, and workshops in Henan and Shaanxi began supplying the demand. Reproduction has been continuous ever since, which means "old-looking" sancai can be genuinely old without being Tang.

The categories worth separating:

• Straightforward modern copies. Made from moulds taken off real pieces, artificially aged with acid, soil and applied iridescence. Usually betrayed by even crazing, surface-sitting dirt and glaze that stops too tidily.
• Composites. A genuine Tang body with a modern head, or two damaged figures made into one. These pass casual inspection and sometimes pass scientific testing, because the sampled part is genuine.
• Heavy restoration sold as condition. A figure that is forty per cent new material, repainted overall, described as "restored". Legal, common, and a different thing from what most buyers think they are getting — the vocabulary of condition and damage reporting matters as much here as anywhere.
• Later genuine wares sold as Tang. Liao dynasty sancai and Song sancai exist, as does Japanese Nara sansai made in imitation of the Tang ware. These are honest objects mislabelled.

What thermoluminescence can and cannot settle

Thermoluminescence dating measures how long a fired ceramic has been accumulating radiation dose since it was last heated. It works well on low-fired earthenware, which makes sancai one of the few areas of Chinese ceramics where a laboratory test is genuinely useful — unlike the high-fired stonewares of the five great Song kilns, where the method is much weaker.

What it does: distinguishes a piece fired in the eighth century from one fired in the twentieth, within a fairly broad margin.

What it does not do: prove that the whole object is that old. A drilled sample tells you about the few grammes of clay you drilled. On a composite, sampling the genuine leg proves nothing about the modern head. It also cannot distinguish Tang from Liao or Song sancai reliably, because the margins overlap, and it can be defeated by deliberate irradiation, which laboratories can usually but not always detect.

Sample from more than one element where the piece allows it, and read the certificate rather than the summary line. A test result is one input to a full authentication process, not a substitute for one.

Provenance, export papers and what to check before you buy

Sancai is archaeological material from tombs, and the legal position matters as much as the connoisseurship. Several jurisdictions, the United States among them, restrict the import of Chinese archaeological material that arrives without proper export documentation, and auction houses increasingly decline consignments that cannot show a collecting history predating the 1970 UNESCO convention.

• Ask for the history in writing. Named previous owners, dated invoices, exhibition or publication references. Assemble and keep the file; the standards are set out in the guide to provenance documents.
• Ask what the piece has been tested for, and where the sample was taken. Get the certificate, not a mention of one.
• Ask for a written condition report naming restored areas. Then check it yourself under ultraviolet light.
• Weigh it and look inside. Mould seams, tool marks and an interior that matches the exterior in colour and texture are hard to fake together.
• Treat a perfect piece with suspicion. Complete, undamaged, brightly painted Tang figures are rare enough that condition alone should raise the standard of evidence you require.

Common questions

Are the three colours always the same three?

No. Sancai names a technique, not a fixed palette. Green from copper, amber and yellow from iron, and cream from uncoloured glaze are the common trio, but many pieces use only two of them and better pieces add cobalt blue or manganese purple-brown. Counting colours is not a dating method; the number on a given piece reflects what the workshop had and what the commission cost.

Was Tang sancai ever used for eating and drinking?

Almost never. The glaze is lead-fluxed and unsafe for food or drink, and the overwhelming majority of surviving pieces are mingqi made for burial. Sancai vessels do exist and some show signs of handling, but they are best understood as tomb furnishings shaped like tableware rather than as household pottery that later went underground.

Why does the glaze stop partway down the piece?

Because it ran. Figures were dipped or poured and set upright to fire, and molten lead glaze migrates downward, thins near the top and pools near the bottom, stopping before the base so that the piece does not stick to the kiln floor. That is why the glaze line is uneven and why bare clay at the feet is normal rather than damage.

Does an iridescent sheen prove a piece is genuine?

No, but its absence is a warning. Iridescence and silvering are products of slow chemical degradation underground, and they are uneven, embedded in the glaze surface and concentrated where the piece lay. Modern workshops reproduce the look with chemical treatment, and the imitation is usually too even and sits on top of the glaze. Use it as one observation among several, never on its own.

Further reading

• Collecting Chinese Bronze Vessels — the metalwork shapes Tang potters borrowed, and the same provenance questions.
• Shipping, Insurance and Storage — moving a fragile lead-glazed figure without adding to its restoration history.
• Glaze Bubbles and Wear as Dating Evidence — reading a glaze surface under magnification.

Browse the collection

Tang sancai is a subject we write about rather than one we stock. Kiln & Ink publishes limited-edition archival giclée reproductions of the twentieth-century Chinese ink masters, hand-numbered and issued with a Certificate of Authenticity — a long way from a tomb horse, but the same discipline of asking what a surface actually shows. Browse the current editions in the Kiln & Ink collection.