rn characteristic
of the Chinese. Elaborate bedsteads, tables and cabinets were also made,
with panels of ash stained a dark color and ornamented with hunting
scenes, in which the men and horses are of ivory, or sometimes with ivory
faces and limbs, the clothes being chiefly in a brown colored wood.

In a beautiful table in the South Kensington Museum, which is said to have
been made in Cochin-China, mother of pearl is largely used and produces a
rich effect.

The furniture brought back by the Duke of Edinburgh from China and Japan
is of the usual character imported, and the remarks hereafter made on
Indian or Bombay furniture apply equally to this adaptation of Chinese
detail to European designs.

The most highly prized work of China and Japan in the way of decorative
furniture is the beautiful lacquer work, and in the notice on French
furniture of the eighteenth century, in a subsequent chapter, we shall see
that the process was adopted in Holland, France and England with more or
less success.

It is worth while, however, to allude to it here a little more fully.

The process as practised in China is thus described by M. Jacquemart:--

"The wood when smoothly planed is covered with a sheet of thin paper or
silk gauze, over which is spread a thick coating made of powdered red
sandstone and buffalo's gall. This is allowed to dry, after which it is
polished and rubbed with wax, or else receives a wash of gum water,
holding chalk in solution. The varnish is laid on with a flat brush, and
the article is placed in a damp drying room, whence it passes into the
hands of a workman, who moistens and again polishes it with a piece of
very fine grained soft clay slate, or with the stalks of the horse-tail or
shave grass. It then receives a second coating of lacquer, and when dry is
once more polished. These operations are repeated until the surface
becomes perfectly smooth and lustrous. There are never applied less than
three coatings and seldom more than eighteen, though some old Chinese and
some Japan ware are said to have received upwards of twenty. As regards
China, this seems quite exceptional, for there is in the Louvre a piece
with the legend 'lou-tinsg,' i.e. six coatings, implying that even so
many are unusual enough to be worthy of special mention."

There is as much difference between different kinds and qualities of lac
as between different classes of marquctcrie.

The most highly prized is the LACQUER ON GOLD