But perhaps the noblest of all Chinese blue and white patterns is the prunus design (often miscalled hawthorn) illustrated by Plate 90, a covered vase once in the Orrock Collection and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The form is that of the well-known ginger jar, but these lovely specimens were intended for no banal uses. They were filled with fragrant tea or some other suitable gift, and sent, like the round cake boxes, by the Chinese to their friends at the New Year, but it was not intended that the jars or boxes should be kept by the recipients of the compliment. The New Year falls in China from three to seven weeks later than in our calendar, and it was seasonable to decorate these jars with sprays and petals of the flowering prunus fallen on the ice, which was already cracked and about to dissolve. The design is symbolic of the passing of winter and the coming of spring; and the vibrating depths of the pure sapphire blue broken by a network of lines simulating ice cracks form a lovely setting for the graceful prunus sprays reserved in the pure curd-like white of the ware. The prunus pattern has been applied to every conceivable form, whether to cover the whole surface or to serve as secondary ornament in the border of a design or on the rim of a plate, and the prunus jar appears in all qualities of blue and on porcelain good and bad, old and new. The graceful sprays have become stereotyped and the whole design vulgarised in many instances; and in some cases the blossoms are distributed symmetrically on a marbled blue ground as a mere pattern. But nothing can stale the beauty of the choice K’ang Hsi originals, on which the finest materials and the purest, deepest blue were lavished. The amateur should find no difficulty in distinguishing these from their decadent descendants. The freshness of the drawing, the pure quality of the blue, and the excellence of body, glaze, and potting are unmistakable. The old examples have the low rim round the mouth unglazed where the rounded cap-shaped cover fitted, and the design on the shoulders is finished off with a narrow border of dentate pattern. The original covers are extremely rare, and in most cases have been replaced with later substitutes in porcelain or carved wood.