This appears rather a slight reason for giving the entire group to Japan. Let us look back to history. From the Wan-li period of the Ming (1619) to the final fall of the dynasty in 1647, or from the irruption of the Tartars in 1616 down to 1662, the Khang-hi period of the Tai-thsings, we know of no porcelain having been made; but in that period, as we have seen, the industry revived. It is then that we again find a director at King-teh-chin, and seventy years later Thang-kong was reviving the bright red and devising the gold ornamentation on black which we find on the mandarin vases. Jacquemart suggests “some years” after 1616 as the date when the Tartar costume was applied to vases. It is probable that it was at least from fifty to seventy years after that date, and that the best specimens belong to the Kien-long period, which began in 1736. After 1662 the imperial factory was apparently as much under the Emperor’s control as it had been under the Mings; in which case he could, it is presumed, order such paintings and figures in such costumes as he pleased. We know, further, that in 1698 two foreign artists--an Italian and a Frenchman--were at the palace giving the Chinese several new ideas about art, especially, as we shall see, about perspective. This may, in part, account for the miniature appearance of the face paintings on the mandarin vases. There is, moreover, no ostensible reason for assigning to the Japanese the origination of a style of decoration at variance with everything else we know of the early traditions of their art, although they followed it afterward. We might rather look to India. We know, at least, that during the Kien-long period the Chinese incurred and acknowledged certain debts to India, and it is in the same country that we find the best miniature painting of the East. Such a supposition would also account for the unusual type presented by some of the mandarins with long pointed beards. [Illustration: Fig. 95.--Ming Vase. Historical Subject. (J. C. Runkle Coll.)]