But there are other cogent reasons which will appeal more directly to the student of ceramics. Among the few specimens of pottery in the Nara Collection,[43] there are several bowls and a dish, accorded in the official catalogue the meagre description "China ware," which have a peculiar glaze of creamy yellow with large, green mottling, and there is besides a drum-shaped vase, "green with yellowish patches." This type of glaze is found on many of the tomb wares, some of which have amber brown and violet blue splashes in addition. From these data it is possible to identify a series of T´ang glazes, including creamy white, straw yellow, faint green, leaf green, amber and violet blue, all soft and more or less transparent with minutely crackled texture and closely analogous to the coloured lead glazes used on our own "Whieldon" pottery of Staffordshire in the eighteenth century. Three years ago a Parisian dealer was offering for sale the contents of an important tomb. For once in a way, the chief articles of the find had been kept together; at least so it was positively asserted, and there was nothing improbable in the circumstance. They included two splendidly modelled figures and a saddled horse in the typical T´ang ware, with bold washes of green and brown glazes, and with them was a stone slab engraved with an inscription. I was able to examine a photograph and a rubbing of this stone, in which excellent judges could find no sign of spurious work. The inscription was long and difficult to translate, but the main facts were clear. It commemorated a princely personage of the name of Wên, whose style was Shou-ch´êng, a man of Lo-yang in Honan, who died at Ho-yang Hsien on the 16th day of the first month of the second year of Yung Shun, viz. 683 A.D. Among the T´ang figurines the horse is conspicuous not only in its comparative frequency, but for the spirit and character with which it is portrayed. The men of T´ang were clearly great horse lovers. Their pictorial artists excelled in painting the noble beast, and the "Hundred Colts" by the celebrated painter Han Kan is a classic of horse painting. Among the precious fragments of T´ang pictures on silk which Sir Aurel Stein brought back from his first expedition in the Taklamakan Desert there were several with scenes in which horsemen figured. I have compared these with the tomb figures and found them to tally with wonderful exactitude, not only in pose and style and in the characteristic rendering of the head and neck, but also in the details of the harness, the saddle with high arched front and shelving back support, the square stirrups, bridle and bit and tassel-like pendant under the mouth.