The self-contained culture of the Middle Kingdom spread at an early time to the less advanced and more or less tributary countries that surrounded it: on the south to the confused complex of states that are conveniently grouped together as Indo-China; on the north to Korea; and on the east, or more accurately on the north-east, to Japan. To these islands, however, the Chinese civilisation for the most part spread by way of Korea, and as this was in a measure the route taken in the case of the potter’s art, it may be well to deal first with the great northern peninsula. The Chinese claim to have conquered and even incorporated Korea as long ago as the Tang dynasty (618-907 A.D.), and even before that time the country had been overrun by the Japanese. The latter people have at all times presented themselves to the Koreans as ruthless conquerors and pirates, and indeed they succeeded during their last great expedition at the end of the sixteenth century in sweeping the country so bare that to this day its poverty and the low state of its artistic culture is generally attributed to this gigantic razzia from which the country never recovered. And yet Korea has always taken a place in Japanese estimation second only to China as a source of their artistic and practical knowledge, if not of their literature and philosophy; and this is especially the case with regard to the potter’s craft--the technical part of it above all. Time and again do we hear of famous Korean potters, or even of whole families and tribes, being brought over and set to work by the local Japanese ruler either with the materials they brought with them, or with the clays and glazes that their experience enabled them to discover in their new homes.