The enamelled wares are much more attractive, and many of the rice bowls are prettily decorated in soft colours. The Peking or medallion bowls, for instance, are little if anything below the standard of previous reigns, and in addition to the medallions in engraved enamel grounds of pink, green, grey, etc., outside, the interior is often painted in underglaze blue. There are tasteful bowls with white bamboo designs reserved in a ground of coral red, and there are dishes with blackthorn boughs with pink blossom in a white ground. The Yung Chêng style of underglaze blue outlines with washes of thin-transparent enamels was also affected, but the most characteristic enamelling of the period is executed in a mixture of transparent and opaque enamels, a blend of _famille verte_ and _famille rose_. This colouring, soft and subdued, but often rather sickly in tone, is frequently seen on bowls and tea wares with Taoist subjects, such as the Eight Immortals, the fairy attendants of Hsi Wang Mu in boats, or the goddess herself on a phœnix passing over the sea to the _t’ien t’ang_ or cloud-wrapt pavilions of Paradise, preceded by a stork with a peach of longevity in its beak. The sea is usually rendered by a conventional wave pattern delicately engraved in greenish white, and sometimes the ground of the design is washed with the same thin, lustrous, greenish white, which was remarked on a group of porcelains described on page 151. The porcelain of these bowls has a white, if rather chalky, body and a greenish white glaze of exaggerated oily sheen, and of the minutely bubbled, “muslin-like” texture which is common to Japanese porcelains. But the ordinary Tao Kuang wares are of poor material, greyish in tone and coarser in grain, with the same peculiarities in the texture of the glaze in an exaggerated degree. [Illustration: Plate 131.--Eighteenth Century Painted Porcelain. Fig. 1.--Plate painted in black and gold, European figures in a Chinese interior. Yung Chêng period. Diameter 9 inches. _British Museum._ Fig. 2.--Dish with floral scrolls in _famille rose_ enamels in a ground of black enamel diapered with green foliage scrolls. Ch’ien Lung period. Diameter 23¼ inches. _Wantage Collection._] [Illustration: Plate 132.--Vase painted in mixed enamels, an Imperial park and a bevy of ladies. _Wantage Collection._ Deep ruby pink borders with coloured floral scrolls and symbols. Ch’ien Lung mark. About 1790. Height 30 inches.]