d by a
brush, but was blown on through a tube, one end of which was covered
with fine muslin, in a rain of minute drops. This ground was either
carried over the whole piece so as to give the effect of a vibrating
blue glaze--in which case it was generally covered with conventional
designs pencilled in ground-up gold-leaf over the glaze--or panels were
reserved in white on which floral designs were afterwards painted in
on-glaze colours.

In the same way the decoration in underglaze red was revived or
re-introduced, and probably the finest pieces of this ware, as of so
many others in our great European collections, date only from the
beginning of the 18th century. Eggshell wares and pierced or reticulated
pieces were made to great perfection, and the coloured glazes in light
green, turquoise, purple and black (see Plate VII.) reached their
height. The early glazes of this type appeared in Sung times (see
above), but on the finely prepared K'ang-hi wares much more striking and
brilliant colour effects were obtained. As in old times, for the
production of some of these glazes a departure was made from the general
Chinese methods. The vessels were first fired to the "biscuit" state,
and then soft alkaline glazes coloured with copper or manganese were
fired over them at a much lower temperature so as to give the
"peacock-blue," "kingfisher-green" and "aubergine-purple" glazes. Many
varieties of single-coloured glazes were made by covering a white glazed
piece with on-glaze colour, and in this way new shades of coloured
glaze, such as the coral-reds (Plate VII.), were obtained. The various
brown or bronze-coloured grounds, so well known in the so-called
"Batavian" porcelain, were obtained by coating the piece with a slip of
some ochreous clay under the usual white glaze. Even these methods do
not exhaust the fertile resources of the potters of this period, for
they carried on concurrently the style of decoration in overglaze
colours, first in the schemes characterized by the predominance of a
vivid green enamel (_famille verte_; see Plate VIII.), and finally, in
the 18th century, in the schemes in which rose, pink and purple colours
predominate (_famille rose_; see Plate VIII.). It is probable that these
latter colours, which owe their tint to gold, were introduced into China
from Europe, but the Chinese employed them whole-heartedly, until in
fact they largely ousted all the earlier types of colour decoration.

During the