The most famous Chinese painter of the T'ang period is Wu Tao-tzÅ­, who
was also the painter most strongly influenced by Central Asian works. As
a pious Buddhist he painted pictures for temples among others. Among the
landscape painters, Wang Wei (721-759) ranks first; he was also a famous
poet and aimed at uniting poem and painting into an integral whole. With
him begins the great tradition of Chinese landscape painting, which
attained its zenith later, in the Sung epoch.

Porcelain had been invented in China long ago. There was as yet none of
the white porcelain that is preferred today; the inside was a
brownish-yellow; but on the whole it was already technically and
artistically of a very high quality. Since porcelain was at first
produced only for the requirements of the court and of high
dignitaries--mostly in state factories--a few centuries later the T'ang
porcelain had become a great rarity. But in the centuries that followed,
porcelain became an important new article of Chinese export. The Chinese
prisoners taken by the Arabs in the great battle of Samarkand (751), the
first clash between the world of Islam and China, brought to the West
the knowledge of Chinese culture, of several Chinese crafts, of the art
of papermaking, and also of porcelain.

The emperor Hsüan Tsung gave active encouragement to all things
artistic. Poets and painters contributed to the elegance of his
magnificent court ceremonial. As time went on he showed less and less
interest in public affairs, and grew increasingly inclined to Taoism and
mysticism in general--an outcome of the fact that the conduct of matters
of state was gradually taken out of his hands. On the whole, however,
Buddhism was pushed into the background in favour of Confucianism, as a
reaction from the unusual privileges that had been accorded to the
Buddhists in the past fifteen years under the empress Wu.