The most striking additions to our knowledge in recent years, have without doubt been those which concern the T´ang pottery. What was previously a blank is now filled with a rich series covering the whole gamut of ceramic wares, from a soft plaster-like material through faïence and stoneware up to true porcelain. The T´ang potters had little to learn in technical matters. They used the soft lead glazes, coloured green, blue, amber, and purplish brown by the same metallic oxides as formed the basis of the cognate glazes on Ming pottery. They used high-fired feldspathic glazes, white, brownish green, chocolate brown, purplish black, and tea-dust green, sometimes with frothy splashes of grey or bluish grey, as on the Sung wares. Sometimes these glazes were superposed as on the Japanese tea jars, which avowedly owed their technique to Chinese models. It is evident that streaked and mottled effects appealed specially to the taste of the time, and marbling both of the glaze and of the body was practised. Carving designs in low relief, or incising them with a pointed instrument and filling in the spaces with coloured glazes, stamping small patterns on the body, and applying reliefs which had been previously pressed out in moulds, were methods employed for surface decoration. Painted designs in unfired pigments appear on some of the tomb wares, and it is now practically certain that painting in black under a green glaze was used by the T´ang potters. Moreover, the existence of porcelain proper in the T´ang period is definitely established. One of the most remarkable features of T´ang pottery is the strong Hellenistic flavour apparent in the shapes of the vessels and in certain details of the ornament, particularly in the former. Other foreign influences observable in T´ang art are Persian, Sassanian, Scytho-Siberian, and Indian, and one would say that Chinese art at this period was in a peculiarly receptive state. As compared with the conventional style of later ages which we have come to regard as characteristically Chinese, the T´ang art is quite distinctive, and almost foreign in many of its aspects.