CHINESE FURNITURE: Probable source of artistic taste--Sir William Chambers quoted--Racinet's "Le Costume Historique"--Dutch Influence--The South Kensington and the late Duke of Edinburgh Collections--Processes of making Lacquer--Screens in the Kensington Museum. JAPANESE FURNITURE: Early History--Sir Rutherford Alcock and Lord Elgin--The Collection of the Shôgun--Famous Collections--Action of the present Government of Japan--Special characteristics. INDIAN FURNITURE: Early European influence--Furniture of the Moguls--Racinet's Work--Bombay Furniture--Ivory Chairs and Tables--Specimens in the India Museum. PERSIAN WOODWORK: Collection of Objets d'Art formed by General Murdoch Smith, R.E.--Industrial Arts of the Persians--Arab influence--South Kensington Specimens. SARACENIC WOODWORK: Oriental customs--Specimens in the South Kensington Museum of Arab Work--M. d'Aveune's Work. CHINESE AND JAPANESE FURNITURE. We have been unable to discover when the Chinese first began to use state or domestic furniture. Whether, like the ancient Assyrians and Egyptians, there was an early civilization which included the arts of joining, carving, and upholstering, we do not know; most probably there was; and from the plaster casts which one sees in our Indian Museum, of the ornamental stone gateways of Sanchi Tope, in Bhopal, Central India, it would appear that, in the early part of our Christian era, the carvings in wood of their neighbours and co-religionists, the Hindoos, represented figures of men and animals in the woodwork of sacred buildings or palaces. The marvellous dexterity in manipulating wood, ivory and stone which we recognize in the Chinese of to-day, is probably inherited from their early ancestors. Sir William Chambers travelled in China in the early part of the eighteenth century. It was he who introduced "the Chinese style" into furniture and decoration, which was adopted by Chippendale and other makers, as will be noticed in the chapter dealing with that period of English furniture. He gives us the following description of the furniture he found in "The Flowery Land."