The most complete display of the foreign colouring is given by a special group of porcelain which is painted in a characteristic and mannered style. It is best known as “eggshell” or “ruby-back” porcelain, from the fact that it is usually very thin and translucent and beautifully potted, and that the exterior of the dishes and plates is often coated with a gold pink enamel varying from pale ruby pink to deep crimson. It usually consists of saucer-shaped dishes, plates, and tea and coffee wares, obviously intended for European use. Occasionally there are vases and lanterns of exquisite lightness and translucency, but the vase forms usually required a more substantial construction, and such specimens as Plate 120, are strongly built, though decorated in the same style as the eggshell wares. The decoration of these porcelains is scarcely less distinctive than their colouring. The central design usually consists of one of the following: a Chinese interior with figures of ladies and children, groups of vases and furniture, baskets of flowers and dishes of fruit, a pheasant on a rock, two quails and growing flowers, a cock and peonies, etc.; and these designs are enclosed by rich borders, sometimes totalling as many as seven in number, composed of hexagon and square, lozenge, trellis or matting diapers, in varying colours, and broken by small irregular panels of flowers or archaic dragons. There are, of course, many other kinds of decoration on these wares. Sometimes the whole design is executed in opaque blue enamel, sometimes it is black and gold. On some the borders are simpler, merely delicately gilt patterns; on others they are ruby pink, plain or broken by enamelled sprays. On the vase forms the ruby either covers the entire ground or is broken, as in Plate 121, Fig. 3, by fan-shaped or picture-shaped panels with polychrome designs. The painting is, as a rule, very finely and carefully executed, but almost always in a distinctive style which is closely paralleled by the Canton enamels.