Though the reader will probably not have the opportunity of identifying these designs on Ch’êng Hua porcelain, they will help him in the description of later wares on which these same motives not infrequently occur. The nine illustrations[70] of Ch’êng Hua porcelain in Hsiang’s Album, for the most part feebly drawn and badly coloured, form an absurd commentary on the glowing descriptions in the text. Their chief interest lies in their bearing on the question of polychrome painting. In some cases the designs have all the appearance of on-glaze enamels; in others they suggest transparent glazes or enamels on the biscuit. The colours used are green, yellow and aubergine brown, the _san ts’ai_ or “three colours,” notwithstanding which the decoration is classed under the general term _wu ts’ai_ (lit. five colours), or polychrome. The phrases used to describe the colouring include _wu ts’ai_, _fu sê_, _t’ien yu_, of which _fu sê_[71] means “applied colours,” which might equally suggest on-glaze enamels or on-biscuit colours, and _t’ien yu_[72] decidedly suggests on-biscuit colouring. On the other hand, in one case[73] we are expressly told that the “colour of the glaze is lustrous white and the painting _upon it_[74] consists of geese, etc.,” an unequivocal description of on-glaze painting. Though the Ch’êng Hua mark is one of the commonest on Chinese porcelain, genuine examples of Ch’êng Hua porcelain are virtually unknown in Western collections. The Imperial wares of the period were rare and highly valued in China in the sixteenth century, and we can hardly hope to obtain them in Europe to-day; but there must be many survivors from the wares produced by the private kilns at the time, and possibly some few examples are awaiting identification in our collections. Unfortunately, the promiscuous use of the mark on later wares, the confused accounts of the blue in the “blue and white,” and the conflicting theories on the polychrome decoration, have all helped to render identifications difficult to make and easy to dispute. The covered cake box in the Bushell collection, figured by Cosmo Monkhouse[75] as a Ch’êng Hua specimen, is closely paralleled in make and style of decoration by a beaker-shaped brush pot in the Franks Collection.[76] Both are delicately pencilled in pale blue; both have a peculiar brown staining in parts of the glaze and a slight warp in the foot rim. In the British Museum piece, however, the foot rim is grooved at the sides to fit a wooden stand, a feature which was not usual before the K’ang Hsi period, and something in the style of the drawing is rather suggestive of Japanese work. There is, however, another specimen in the Franks Collection[77] which is certainly Chinese of the Ming dynasty, and possibly of the Ch’êng Hua period, of which it bears the mark. It is a vase of baluster form, thick and strongly built, with great weight of clay at the foot, and unfortunately, like so many of