Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 1.djvu/212

 CHINA

brown and leaves in green, are moulded with much skill into the forms of an ink-pot anda rouge-holder. The rouge-pot is 24 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 isa 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 aspecimen.” 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 Mzng collectors. There is no question of anything falling within the category of the various “ families’ 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-té year-mark in blue sous couverte. But even here the 184