Thus the Chinese theatre, with its union with music, should rather be called opera, although it offers a sort of pantomimic show.  What amounted to a court conservatoire trained actors and musicians as early as in the T’ang period for this court opera.  These actors and musicians were selected from the best-looking “commoners”, but they soon tended to become a special caste with a legal status just below that of “burghers”.

In plastic art there are fine sculptures in stone and bronze, and we have also technically excellent fabrics, the finest of lacquer, and remains of artistic buildings; but the principal achievement of the T’ang period lies undoubtedly in the field of painting.  As in poetry, in painting there are strong traces of alien influences; even before the T’ang period, the painter Hsieh Ho laid down the six fundamental laws of painting, in all probability drawn from Indian practice.  Foreigners were continually brought into China as decorators of Buddhist temples, since the Chinese could not know at first how the new gods had to be presented.  The Chinese regarded these painters as craftsmen, but admired their skill and their technique and learned from them.

The most famous Chinese painter of the T’ang period is Wu Tao-tzu, 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 Hsuean 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.