We know little of the source or of the composition of the glass used by the Chinese. Some of it was made in Pekin, but the province of Shantung seems to have long been the centre of the glass manufacture.[280] Here were made the little bricks of coloured glass (four inches by twelve and two inches in thickness)—the _Po-li-chuan_—which were sold to the glass-workers and enamellers in Pekin and elsewhere. These glass bricks were at one time imitated in Bohemia with the special object of supplying the Chinese markets—the imitations were known in the trade as _pomana_. As to the materials from which the native glass was made, there is little or no available information. We are told incidentally that it was compounded by fusing a certain rock with saltpetre.[281] This statement, and the fact of the use of imported ‘metal’ from Bohemia, make it probable that the glass belongs on the whole to the potash family. So again, the Chinese have long been acquainted with lead fluxes and enamels, and it was doubtless this experience that enabled them to command such a surprising range of colours in the glasses with which they built up their little snuff-bottles. We shall then probably not be wrong in regarding the glass of these bottles as of the potash-lead family.[282] Finally, we may say of this Chinese glass that it can lay claim to a prominent and distinct place in any general history such as this, on the ground not only of the originality of its technique, but also because of the influence which, as I have already pointed out, it has had of late years upon the ‘new glass’ of France. The position of JAPAN with regard to glass is a unique one. It is perhaps the only country that in past or present times has taken an important place in the world of art where the use of glass, whether for practical or æsthetic purposes, has remained almost absolutely unknown. I make this statement, of course, of the country as it was before the late revolution. Nowadays the art of glass-making, like other Western arts, is practised with some success, but without, I think, any original developments which would call for notice. The name they have for glass—_bidoro_—is evidently derived from the Spanish _vidrio_, or the Portuguese _vidro_. But the Japanese never appear to have taken even that sporadic interest in the material that they showed for other exotic productions that at times filtered in from the West.