It can only be learnt by comparing the actual specimens, and by training the eye to distinguish the best from the second best. The patterns are not always blue on a white ground. Many of the most beautiful results were obtained by reserving the design in white in a blue ground, and both styles are often combined on the same piece. The second is fairly common on the K’ang Hsi porcelains, being specially suited to the lambrequins, arabesques, and formal patterns which were a favourite decoration at this time. See Plates 89 and 91. [Illustration: PLATE 89 Three examples of K’ang Hsi Blue and White Porcelain in the British Museum Fig. 1.--Ewer with leaf-shaped panels of floral arabesques, white in blue, enclosed by a mosaic pattern in blue and white: stiff plantain leaves on the neck and cover. Silver mount with thumb-piece. Height 7⅛ inches. Fig. 2.--Deep bowl with cover, painted with “tiger-lily” scrolls. Mark, a leaf. Height 7½ inches. Fig. 3.--Sprinkler with panels of lotus arabesques, white in blue, and _ju-i_ shaped border patterns. A diaper of small blossoms on the neck. Mark, a leaf. Height 7⅛ inches.] The choicest materials were lavished on the porcelains with these formal designs, which consisted now of bands of _ju-i_ shaped lappets[279] filled with arabesque foliage, forming an upper and lower border, between which are floral sprays, now of a belt of three or four palmette-like designs, similarly ornamented, and linked together round the centre of a vase or bottle; of large, stiff, leaf-shaped medallions borrowed, like the patterns which fill them, from ancient bronzes, and of ogre-head designs from a similar source; of successive belts of arabesque scrolls and dragon designs covering cylindrical jars; of a mosaic of small blossoms, or of network diapers recalling the pattern of a crackled porcelain. The white on blue process is constant in a well known decoration in which archaic dragons, floral arabesques, roses or peonies are arranged in “admired disorder” over the whole surface of a cylinder vase or a triple gourd, as on Plate 91. Sometimes the roses occupy the greater part of the design, and among them are small oval or round blank medallions, which have earned for the pattern the name of “rose and ticket.” This type of ware is represented in almost every variety in the Dresden collection, and there are examples of the “rose and ticket” jars in the _Porzellan-zimmer_ of the Charlottenburg Palace. Both these collections are mainly composed of the export porcelain sent from China in the last decades of the seventeenth century, and the latter is practically limited to the presents made by the English East India Company to Queen Sophia Charlotte of Prussia (1688–1705). The white on blue patterns are also freely used in combination with blue and white to form borders and to fill in the ground between panels.