CHINA
CHINA
of the highest importance. It establishes an affinity between the Yu--hung and the celebrated Pin-kwo- ts'ing (‘‘ peach-bloom”’).
As to red sous couverte found in combination with blue, sometimes the one colour predominates, some- times the other. Many of the specimens in this class are of remarkable beauty and value, especially those of the Kang-hst and Yung-ching eras, in which the grand blue, delicate, pure and brilliant, charac- teristic of those epochs, consorts most effectively with the red. In these examples also the presence of green spots or dapples, floating in the red field, constitutes a mark of special choiceness, and fre- quently helps to give point to the decorative design. Favourite subjects with the decorator were the Eight Taoist Immortals in blue walking on red waves; red flowers suspended among blue scrolls ; blue drag- ons among red clouds or waves; white dragons, with finely engraved scales, among red waves, pome- granate trees, their branches and leaves in blue and their fruit in red, and floral or leaf scrolls in red divided by blue bands. Large and imposing speci- mens decorated with the two colours under the glaze are occasionally found, but where red alone is em- ployed the choicest examples are generally small. Finally it may be noted that many specimens of these porcelains carry the six-ideograph mark (Ta- tsing Kang-hst nien chih, or Ta-tsing Yung-ching nien chih) in blue sous couverte. ‘The reader should per- haps be reminded that no reference is here made to over-glaze decoration in red combined with blue sous couverte. That belongs to an entirely different category.
The next year-period after Kang-hst was Yung-
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