It is nearly two hundred years since the famous letters of the Jesuit missionary, the Père D’Entrecolles, were written, and these letters still remain our best source of information for the processes of manufacture at King-te-chen. There was little further information on the subject from the Chinese side[25] until, in 1856, Stanislas Julien translated part of a Chinese work treating chiefly of the same porcelain factory--this is the _King-te-chen Tao Lu_, a book which contains in addition some information about the history of the different wares. This translation was for many years the only native source of information available to students of Chinese porcelain, and many were the misconceptions and blunders in which these students were landed. The book was indeed accompanied by a preface and valuable notes by M. Salvétat, the porcelain expert of Sèvres, but Julien himself, though an eminent Chinese scholar, had no practical acquaintance either with the matter in hand or indeed with the country generally. The beginning of a sounder knowledge of the subject was made when that collector of genius, the late Sir A. Wollaston Franks, published a catalogue of the private collection of Japanese and Chinese porcelain which he afterwards presented to the nation. His marvellous intuition and his vast experience enabled him to seize upon points of resemblance and difference which threw light upon the origin of the various wares, and to expose at the same time the inconsistencies of the arrangements then in vogue. He it was who first pointed out the general worthlessness, as a guide to the date or even the country of any piece of porcelain, of the name of dynasty and emperor which it might bear. His successor, Mr. C. H. Read, has well carried on the tradition. At the present moment the British Museum is one of the few places where an attempt has been made at a systematic arrangement of a representative collection of Chinese and Japanese porcelain.[26]