development, as its name implies, only took place in the reign of Wan-li
(1573-1620).

At this time King-te-chen must have produced a very large quantity of
porcelain. The requirements of the court were enormous, for in 1583 one
of the supervising censors, remonstrating with the emperor, declared
that one year's demands comprised over 96,000 pieces; and Dr Bushell
writes: "The colossal production of the reign of Wan-li is shown by the
abundance of porcelain of this time to be found in Pekin at the present
day, where a garden of any pretensions must have a large collection of
bowls or cisterns for goldfish, and street-hawkers may be seen with
sweetmeats upheld by dishes a yard in diameter, or ladling syrup out of
large bowls, and there is hardly a butcher's shop without a cracked
Wan-li jar standing on the counter to hold scraps of meat."

Such profuse orders may be accountable for the fact that the wares of
this reign are inferior both in material and workmanship to the wares of
the preceding and also of later periods, but the influence of the
growing export trade doubtless told in the same direction. For several
centuries the native Chinese porcelain had been exported to all the
neighbouring countries, and through Persia and Cairo to the West. No
long time elapsed before the Chinese adopted forms, colours and
decorations for these export wares, not in accordance with Chinese
usage, but presumably more suited to the tastes of the foreigner. Hence
the Persian and Syrian style of the painted blue decoration of the 15th
and 16th century wares found in other Asiatic countries. Now, for the
first time, there came a direct European demand, and cargoes of ware
were brought to Europe by the Portuguese and afterwards by the Dutch,
which were increasingly decorated in fashions foreign to Chinese taste.
The production of these export wares slowly modified the taste of the
Chinese themselves and paved the way for the new styles of the late 17th
and early 18th centuries.

The political troubles which marked the downfall of the Ming dynasty
definitely separated the first great period of Chinese porcelain from
its second and culminating period. The works at King-te-chen were
destroyed more than once in the 17th century, but in spite of these
difficulties the potters must have remained, for the reigns of K'ang-hi
(1662-1722), Yung-cheng (1722-1735), and K'ien-lung (1736-1795) covered
a century and a half, within which the high-water