There are many motives intended to appeal to the Chinese literatus, and specially suited to ornament the furniture of the writing table. Symposia of literary personages, for instance, make an appropriate design for a brush pot, or again, the meeting of the celebrated coteries, the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove who lived in the third century, and the worthies of the Orchid Pavilion, including the famous calligrapher, Wang Hsi-chih, who met in the fourth century to drink wine, cap verses, and set their cups floating down the “nine-bend river” (see Plate 104, Fig. 1). The Horace of China, Li T’ai-po, the great T’ang poet, is represented in drunken slumber leaning against an overturned wine jar or receiving the ministrations of the Emperor and his court. He also figures among the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup, a suitable subject for an octagonal bowl. Poets, painters, and sages are often seen in mountain landscapes contemplating the beauties of Nature; two sages meeting on a mountain side is a frequent subject and is known as the “happy meeting,” or again, it is a single sage, with attendant carrying a bowl, book, and fan, or sometimes bringing an offering of a goose. In rare instances these figures can be identified with Chinese worthies such as Chiang Tzŭ-ya, who sits fishing on a river bank, or Chu Mai-ch’ên, the wood-cutter, reading as he walks with his faggots on his back. The stories of the _Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety_ provide a complete series of popular subjects, which may be seen in the panels of Plate 91, Fig. 3. Women are represented by the Virtuous Heroines; by celebrated beauties such as Yang Kuei-fei, consort of the T’ang ruler Ming Huang,[495] and Hsi Shih, the Chinese Delilah who was the undoing of Fu Ch’ai, prince of Wu, in the fifth century B.C.; by the poetess Tan Hui-pan, and by a hundred nameless figures which occur in genre designs, and by the idealised beauties, _mei jên_ (graceful ladies), which the Dutch ungallantly dubbed with the name of _lange lijsen_ or long Elizas. The domestic occupations of a lady form another series of subjects for polygonal vessels; and women are sometimes seen engaged in the Four Subjects of Study--Poetry, Rites, History, and Music--or in the Four Liberal Accomplishments--Writing, Painting, Music, and Checkers--but the groups who make up these scenes are more often composed of men. The game of checkers or _gô_, which is so often loosely rendered chess,[496] is _wei ch’i_ the “surrounding game,” a favourite Chinese amusement, which figures in two well-known subjects of porcelain decoration. One of these is the legend of Wang Chih, the Taoist patriarch, watching the game played by two old men, the spirits of the Pole Stars, in a mountain retreat; the other is the story of the general Hsieh An, who refused to allow the news of an important victory to disturb his game.