Porcelain was early held in high esteem, and a vase was regarded as a fit present from one potentate to another. It was very rare in Western Europe until the Portuguese opened the Eastern gates. Mediaeval travellers had frequently referred to its preciousness. Edrisi (1154) says of Susah: “Here are made an unequalled kind of porcelain, the Ghazar of China.” There was always a certain mystery attached to its composition and qualities till the beginning of the eighteenth century. Ibn Batuta, who travelled in Bengal and China about 1350, gives a more or less fabulous account of its manufacture. He says: “Porcelain in China is of about the same value as earthenware with us, or even less. It is exported to India and elsewhere, passing from country to country till it reaches us in Morocco. It is certainly the finest of all pottery ware.” In 1420 the Embassy sent by Shah Rukh to the Chinese Court mentions a buffet on which were arranged flagons, cups and goblets of silver and porcelain. The scribe also bears witness to the fact that “in the arts of stone-polishing, cabinet-making, pottery and brick-making, there is nobody with us who can compare with the Chinese.” Early in the sixteenth century, before 1520, A. Pigapheta made a voyage to the East. He describes a visit to the house of the Queen of Mindanao: “I sat down by the side of her; she was weaving a palm mat to sleep upon. Throughout her house was seen porcelain vases suspended to the walls and four metal timbals.” He tells us that in Borneo, at Bruni: “For one cathil (a weight equal to two of our pounds) of quicksilver they gave us six porcelain dishes; for a cathil of metal they gave one small porcelain vase, and a large vase for three knives.... The merchandise which is most esteemed here is bronze, quicksilver, cinnabar, glass, woollen stuffs, linens; but above all they esteem iron and spectacles. “Since I saw such use made of porcelain I got some information respecting it, and I learned that it is made with a kind of very white earth, which is left underground for fully fifty years to refine it, so that they are in the habit of saying that a father buries it for his son. It is said that if poison is put into a vessel of fine porcelain it breaks immediately.”