[1] Chinese ink is a very different composition from the ink of Western countries. It is a solid made of soot obtained by burning certain plants, which is then combined with glue or oil and moulded into a cake and dried. Other ingredients may be added to produce sheen or a dead finish. It improves with age if properly kept. The cake is moistened and rubbed on a slab, and the ink thus obtained must be used in a special way and with special care to produce the full effect.--TRANSLATOR. [Illustration: PLATE I. SCULPTURED STONES OF THE HAN DYNASTY Second to Third Centuries. Rubbings taken by the Chavannes Expedition.] The brush-stroke in the painting of the Far East is of supreme importance. We know that this could not be otherwise if we recall that the characters in Chinese writing are ideographs, not actually _written_, but rather _drawn_. The stroke is not a mere formal, lifeless sign. It is an expression in which is reflected the beauty of the thought that inspired it as well as the quality of the soul of him who gives it form. In writing, as in painting, it reveals to us the character and the conception of its author. Placed at the service of certain philosophical ideas, which will be set forth later on, this technique was bound to lead to a special code of Aesthetics. The painter seeks to suggest with an unbroken line the fundamental character of a form. His endeavor, in this respect, is to simplify the objective images of the world to the extreme, replacing them with ideal images, which prolonged meditation shall have freed from every non-essential. It may therefore be readily understood how the brush-stroke becomes so personal a thing, that in itself it serves to reveal the hand of the master. There is no Chinese book treating of painting which does not discuss and lay stress upon the value of its aesthetic code. II. REPRESENTATION OF FORMS It has often been said that in Chinese painting, as in Japanese painting, perspective is ignored. Nothing is further from the truth. This error arises from the fact that we have confused one system of perspective with perspective as a whole. There are as many systems of perspective as there are conventional laws for the representation of space.