possible to see a slight metallic sheen even on the blackened silver if the porcelain is held obliquely to the light. Another refined and unobtrusive decoration was effected by pencilling in pale iron red supplemented with gilding. There is a large series of this red and gold porcelain in the Dresden collection, and it seems to belong to the late K’ang Hsi or the Yung Chêng period. Another telling combination, including black, red and gold, dates from this time. The black and gold variety is well illustrated by an interesting plate in the British Museum which represents European figures in early eighteenth-century costume in a Chinese interior (Plate 131, Fig. 1). The Imperial list[403] alludes to the use of silver and gold both to cover the entire surface like a monochrome (_mo yin_ and _mo chin_), and in painted designs (_miao yin_ and _miao chin_).[404] Three of these decorations are said to have been in Japanese style, but the precise significance of this is not clear. Gilding was freely used in combination with red and blue, and especially over the blue, on Arita porcelain, but the application of it does not seem to differ from the ordinary Chinese gilding. The one feature common to the Chinese and Japanese gilding is its lightness and restraint as compared with the heavy gilding of European porcelains. Plate 125 illustrates a peculiar ware which belongs in part to the reign of Yung Chêng and in part to that of Ch’ien Lung. It attempts to reproduce the soft colouring on the enamelled glass made by Hu,[405] whose studio-name was Ku-yüeh-hsüan (“ancient moon pavilion”). A small brush holder[406] of this glass is shown on Fig. 125, an opaque white material, not unlike our old Bristol glass, delicately painted in _famille rose_ colours with groups of the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove. It is said that[407] the Emperor admired the soft colouring on this ware, and expressed a wish to see the same effect produced in porcelain. T’ang Ying thereupon set out to solve the problem by making a highly vitreous body with glassy glaze on which the enamels assumed the soft tints of the original model. This type of porcelain, known as _fang ku yüeh hsüan_ (“imitation of Ku-yüeh-hsüan”), is greatly prized. Mr. A. E. Hippisley has described a small group in the catalogue of his collection from which I have been permitted to illustrate an example (Plate 125). Mr. Hippisley states that the earlier specimens of the glass are marked with the four characters _ta ch’ing nien chih_ (made in the great Ch’ing period), the reign name Yung Chêng being omitted; the later pieces, of which the brush pot in our illustration is one, have the Ch’ien Lung mark in four characters. Bushell[408] has figured a yellow glazed snuff bottle with the actual mark _Ku yüeh hsüan chih_ (see vol. i. p. 219).