Page 238 - Oriental Series Japan and China, Brinkly

CHINA

brown and leaves in green, are moulded with much

skill into the forms of an ink-pot and a rouge-holder.

The rouge-pot is 2^ inches high, and four inches in

diameter. It was used by one of the imperial prin-
cesses to hold vermilion for painting the lips and face.
Its owner asked a hundred taels for it at the time

when H'siang wrote (second half of the sixteenth
century), and it would command many times that
price to-day. The third specimen is a tiny wine-cup,

covered inside and outside with scroll-pattern engraved

in the paste, and having a diapered border of red sous

couverte. Round the body is coiled a vermilion

dragon with teeth and foreclaws fixed in the rim.

H'siang says that only two or three of these beautiful

little cups remain throughout the empire, and that

" a hundred taels is not considered too much to pay

for a specimen." From such authenticated examples,

not only accurately described in the text of the Cata-

logue, but also carefully reproduced in its illustrations,

a clear idea may be formed of what kind of enamelled

wares constituted the ideal of Ming collectors. There

is no question o"ffaamniyltiheisn"g falling within the category
of the various
into which European con-

noisseurs have divided the enamelled porcelains of

China. The brilliantly massed enamels and elaborate
designs that distinguish members of these " families "

did not appear, or at any rate were not valued, in the

greatest keramic periods of the Ming dynasty. One

piece depicted by H'siang would probably be classed

with Famille Verte by Jacquemart's disciples. It is a

pagoda, a foot and a half high, its tiles green, its

balustrades red, its doors yellow all these colours

in enamels and its base inscribed with the Hsuan-te

year-mark in blue sous couverte. But even here the

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