Hsiang Yüan-p’ien illustrates in his Album one Yung Lo specimen, a low cylindrical bowl of the “bodiless” kind, “thin as paper,” with a very delicate dragon and phœnix design, which is seen when the bowl is held to the light and carefully inspected. This style of ornament is described as _an hua_ (secret decoration), but it is not stated whether, in this case, it was engraved in the paste or traced in white slip. The mention of “fresh red” (_hsien hung_), which seems to have been used on the Yung Lo porcelain as well as in the succeeding Hsüan Tê period, brings to mind a familiar type of small bowl with slight designs in blue inside, often a figure of a boy at play, the exterior being coated with a fine coral red, over which are lotus scrolls in gold. There are several in the British Museum, and one, with a sixteenth-century silver mount, was exhibited at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1910.[15] The term _hsien hung_ is certainly used for an underglaze copper red on the Hsüan Tê porcelain, and it is doubtful whether it can have been loosely applied to an overglaze iron red on the earlier ware. For the bowls to which I refer have an iron red decoration, though it is sometimes wonderfully translucent and, being heavily fluxed, looks like a red glaze instead of merely an overglaze enamel (see Plate 74). Several of these red bowls have the Yung Lo mark, others have merely marks of commendation or good wish. Their form is characteristic of the Ming period, and the base is sometimes convex at the bottom, sometimes concave. They vary considerably in quality, the red in some cases being a translucent and rather pale coral tint, and in others a thick, opaque brick red. Probably they vary in date as well, the former type being the earlier and better. It is exemplified by an interesting specimen in the Franks Collection marked _tan kuei_ (red cassia), which indicates its destination as a present to a literary aspirant, the red cassia being a symbol of literary success. This piece has, moreover, a stamped leather box of European--probably Venetian--make, which is not later than the sixteenth century. This, if any of these bowls, belongs to the Yung Lo period, but it will be seen presently that the iron red was used as an inferior but more workable substitute for the underglaze red in the later Ming reigns, and, it must be added, these bowls are strangely numerous for a fifteenth-century porcelain. That they are a Yung Lo type, however, there is little doubt, for this red and gold decoration (_kinrande_ of the Japanese) is the adopted style which won for the clever Kioto potter, Zengoro Hozen, the art name _Ei raku_, i.e. Yung Lo in Japanese. CHAPTER II HSÜAN TÊ [chch 2] (1426–1435)