This want of interest is noticeable in all our dealings with the yellow races. In industrial undertakings we constantly confuse China and Japan, and Japanese goods often pass for Chinese. Even those who profess to have studied the history of Japanese art have been found to attribute to Japan the fundamental ideas which originated in China. The more one comes into contact with Chinese and Japanese works, the more clearly one sees that the honour of originality and initiative belongs to China. The celebrated Japanese painters, sculptors, and bronze-workers were taught by China; they were clever imitators of Chinese art. In point of execution they have doubtless in many cases surpassed their masters. The detail work of Japanese art is decidedly finer and better finished than the Chinese, and in the work of reproduction they have attained a degree of perfection unparalleled in any other industrial nation. But this, after all, is rather a matter of skill than of genius. The artistic conception, the creative power, was far more original in ancient China than in ancient Japan, and although the minutiae of Chinese art were often crude and imperfect, the fundamental idea was always noble and grand. We notice this particularly in their architecture. China's marble and stone yamens and pagodas were imitated by Japan, but with this difference, that they are built of wood and roofed over with shingles or thatch. In the various branches of sculpture and painting we see the same divergence. The Japanese was always an excellent copyist, but he drew his inspirations from China, in much the same manner in which the masters of the Renaissance school used the antique masterpieces for their models.