I have seen examples of this style belonging to various periods, mostly eighteenth century, but some certainly late Ming[36] (see Plate 67, Fig. 4). Seven examples of Hsüan blue and white porcelain are figured in Hsiang’s Album,[37] comprising an ink pallet, a vase shaped like a section of bamboo, a goose-shaped wine jar, a vase with an elephant on the cover, a tea cup, a sacrificial vessel, and a lamp with four nozzles. In five of these the blue is confined to slight pencilled borders, merely serving to set off the white ground, which is compared to driven snow. The glaze is rich and thick, and of uneven surface, rising in slight tubercles likened to “grains of millet.” This is the “orange skin” glaze. The blue in each case is _hui hu[38] ta ch’ing_ (deep Mohammedan blue). Of the two remaining instances, one is painted with a dragon in clouds, and the other with “dragon pines,” and in the latter case the glaze is described as “lustrous like mutton fat jade,” and the blue as “of intensity and brilliance to dazzle the eye.” The impression conveyed by all these examples is that they represent a type quite different from that described as “heaped and piled,” a type in which delicate pencilling was the desideratum, the designs being slight and giving full play to the white porcelain ground. It is, in fact, far closer in style to the delicately painted Japanese Hirado porcelain than to the familiar Chinese blue and white of the K’ang Hsi period. Plate 60 illustrates a little flask-shaped vase in the Franks Collection, which purports to be a specimen of Hsüan Tê blue and white porcelain. It has a thick, “mutton fat” glaze of faint greenish tinge, and is decorated with a freely drawn peach bough in underglaze blue which has not developed uniformly in the firing. The colour in places is deep, soft and brilliant, but elsewhere it has assumed too dark a hue.[39] Its certificate is engraved in Chinese fashion on the box into which it has been carefully fitted--_hsüan tz’ŭ pao yüeh p’ing_, “precious moon vase of Hsüan porcelain”--attested by the signature Tzŭ-ching, the studio name of none other than Hsiang Yüan-p’ien, whose Album has been so often quoted. Without attaching too much weight to this inscription, which is a matter easily arranged by the Chinese, there is nothing in the appearance of this quite unpretentious little vase which is inconsistent with an early Ming origin.