It would be futile to attempt to describe exhaustively the different kinds of K’ang Hsi blue and white and the innumerable patterns with which they are decorated. We must confine our descriptions to a few type specimens, but first it will be useful to give the points of a choice example. Such a vessel, whatever its nature, will be potted with perfect skill, its form well proportioned and true. The surface will be smooth, because the material is thoroughly refined and the piece has been carefully trimmed or finished on the lathe, and finally all remaining inequalities have been smoothed away with a moist feather brush before the glazing. The ware will be clean and white, and the glaze[276] pure, limpid, and lustrous, but with that faint suspicion of green which is rarely absent from Chinese porcelain. The general effect of the body and glaze combined is a solid white like well set curds. The base, to which the connoisseur looks for guidance, is deeply cut and washed in the centre with glaze which reaches about half-way down the sides of the foot rim. This patch of glaze is usually pinholed, as though the nemesis of absolute perfection had to be placated by a few flaws in this inconspicuous part. The rim itself is carefully trimmed, and in many cases grooved or beaded, as though to fit a wooden stand,[277] and the unglazed edge reveals a smooth, close-grained biscuit whose fine white material is often superficially tinged with brown in the heat of the furnace. The decoration is carefully painted in a pure sapphire blue of great depth and fire, and singularly free from any strain of red or purple--a quality of blue only obtained by the most elaborate process of refining. The designs, as on the Ming porcelains, are first drawn in outline; but, unlike the strong Ming outlines, these are so faint as to be practically unobserved; and the colour is filled in, not in flat washes, as on the Ming blue and white, but in graded depths of pulsating blue. This procedure is clearly shown by two interesting bowls in the British Museum. They are identical in form and were intended to match in pattern; but in one the design (the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup) is completed, while on the other it remains in outline only, giving us a wonderful illustration of the beautiful firm touch with which the artists traced these faint outlines. The work of decoration was systematically subdivided in the Chinese factory, and Père d’Entrecolles tells us that “one workman is solely occupied with the ring which one sees on the border of the ware; another outlines the flowers, which a third paints; one does the water and the mountains, another the birds and animals.”[278] Whatever the advantages and disadvantages of this divided labour, the designs on the blue and white were admirably chosen to show off the fine qualities of the colour; and it is to the blue that the collector looks first. The distinction between the various qualities of blue hardly admit of verbal definition.