ish
supplants the broad freedom of direct brushwork. During the 18th century
the same leaven was at work on the porcelains of China and of Europe,
the East influenced the West, and the West in its turn bore down the
East. If Chinese porcelain remained superior to its European
counterfeits, it was because the Chinaman was still the better potter
and had a longer tradition of decorative art behind him.

There is little to be said of Chinese porcelain during the 19th century.
The European demand was practically killed by the growth of porcelain
works at home, and the imperial patronage, so great a factor in the
production of artistic wares, was fitful and uncertain. Tao-Kwang
(1821-1850) gave some attention to porcelain, and the pieces made for
him and marked "_Shen-te-t'ang_" are valued by collectors. The so-called
Peking bowls of his reign (made of course at King-te-chen) are also of
repute. But the political difficulties of China left little leisure for
the cultivation of the arts; the successive wars with France and England
served only to scatter the splendid wares of the past (see the Musee
Chinoise at Fontainebleau), and during the reign of the next emperor
Hien-feng (1851-1861) the T'aipings overran the province of Kiang-si and
destroyed King-te-chen and its factories. Since then the town has been
rebuilt and is once again producing Chinese porcelain. Tempted doubtless
by the high prices now paid in Europe and America for examples of the
Chinese porcelains of the 18th century, modern copies of the
single-coloured, _sang de boeuf_, _flambe_ and other glazes are being
made, while the highly prized "hawthorn" jars and black-ground vases are
receiving the same undesirable attention.

_Materials and, Manufacture of Chinese Porcelain._--For many centuries
after its first appearance Chinese porcelain differed from every other
known species of pottery both in its material and its manufacture.
While the pottery of all other countries was generally made of
coloured clays mixed only with sand or broken "shards" and fired at a
comparatively low temperature, Chinese porcelain was compounded from
the purest white clays, sand and fusible rock; it was glazed with
fusible rock, and it was so hard fired that the entire mass became
vitrified and translucent. The germ of the manufacture lay in the
discovery of large masses of primary clay (kaolin) mixed with
finely-ground felspathic rock (petuntse), both of which