[75] Why, by the way, do we find, in catalogues otherwise well edited, porcelain ascribed to the Kang-he dynasty? One might as well speak of the Louis xiv. dynasty.
[76] At least such was the case when the Canal was in working order. For some time since, the Grand Canal has only been navigable when the country is flooded.
[77] I cannot find the exact date of the first publication of these letters. In the eighteenth century we find them generally quoted from Du Halde.
[78] This is a passage made use of by Longfellow in those often-quoted lines beginning—
‘A burning town, or seeming so,
Three thousand furnaces that glow,’ etc.
[79] If we are to understand by this ‘transparent pebble’ some form of arsenic, for it would seem that arsenic (and not tin as with us) is the base of the opaque white enamels of the Chinese, it is difficult to believe that so volatile a substance could be thus prepared.
[80] For the use of steatite in English porcelain see chap. xxii. At Vinovo, in Piedmont, another magnesian mineral has been employed for the paste.
[81] In the following summary I have kept to the Père D’Entrecolles’s words as far as possible, but with considerable abbreviations.
[82] We must here think of the more sober famille verte lantern at South Kensington, rather than of the magnificent specimen of pierced work in the Salting collection, which is of later date.
[83] The unique bowl of Chinese porcelain illustrated in Du Sartel’s book, of which the outside is decorated in black and gold in imitation of the Limoges enamel of the renaissance, may have had some such origin. This piece, on which even the initials of the original French artist have been copied, was formerly in the Marquis collection, and is now to be seen in the Grandidier Gallery at the Louvre.