has an interior lining washed with blue to serve as a backing for the pierced work, and it is painted inside with dragon designs in Wan Li grey blue. It bears a mark which occurs on other late Ming porcelains, _yü tang chia ch’i_ (beautiful vessel for the Jade Hall).[188] Examples of this same pierced and relief work in white, without the supplementary blue designs, though rare, are yet to be seen in several collections. If marked at all they usually bear the apocryphal date of Ch’êng Hua, but an example in the Marsden Perry collection, Providence, U.S.A., has the T’ien Ch’i (1621–1627) date under the base, which no doubt represents the true period of its manufacture. This intricate _ling lung_ work, which the Wan Li censor deprecated as too difficult and elaborate, has been perpetuated, though it was probably never more beautifully executed than in the late Ming period. The later examples are mostly characterised by larger perforations, which were easier to manage. There are several references to the pierced and relief decorations in the lists of porcelain supplied to the Court of Wan Li, e.g. “brush rests with sea waves and three dragons in relief over pierced designs, and landscapes,” “landscape medallions among pierced work,” and “sacred fungus carved in openwork, and figures of ancient cash.” In the finer examples of pierced work the most frequent design is the fret or key pattern often interwoven with the four-legged symbol known as the swastika, which commonly serves in Chinese for the character _wan_ (ten thousand), carrying a suggested wish for “long life,” as expressed in the phrase _wan sui_ (Jap. _banzai_), ten thousand years. The pierced patterns are carved out of the porcelain body when the ware has been dried to a “leather-tough” consistency, and the manipulative skill exercised in the cutting and handling of the still plastic material is almost superhuman. Similar _tours de force_ distinguish the Japanese Hirado porcelain, and Owen’s work in our own Worcester ware exhibits extraordinary skill, but I doubt if anything finer in this style has ever been made than the _ling lung_ bowls of the late Ming potters. Another form of decoration which, if not actually included in the _ling lung_ category, is at any rate closely allied to it, is the fretwork cut deeply into the body of the ware without actually perforating it, the hollows of the pattern being generally left without glaze. This ornament is used in borders or to fill the spaces between blue and white medallions after the manner of the pierced fretwork, and it was evidently contemporaneous with the latter, viz. dating from the late Ming period onwards (Plate 68, Fig. 3).