The circumstances leading to the confounding of Chinese and Japanese porcelain arose chiefly from trade. The Japanese are said to have gone to King-teh-chin, even in early times, to buy porcelain. According to Duhalde, the Chinese repaid the compliment by loading their vessels with Japanese porcelain on returning from that country. This is corroborated by the missionaries at Pekin, who state that the people there highly prized the Japanese porcelain, which was, in consequence, both rare and dear. They even used it in preference to their own in making presents to the emperor and grandees. De Pere states that when the Emperor wished to send a present of porcelain to Peter the Great, he chose that of Japan, where, says the writer, the people surpass those of China in all the arts and industries. We know, moreover, that the Japanese import Chinese egg-shell for decoration, that the Chinese have borrowed the designs of the Japanese, and that the Japanese have borrowed those of China. The most skilful imitators in the world, living next door to each other, complimented each other’s skill by mutual imitation. There are two chronological points that may help us to throw some light into this confusion, which writers have succeeded in making twice confounded. [Illustration: Fig. 100.--Rose-back Egg-shell. (W. L. Andrews Coll.)] There can be no doubt that the porcelain of the Rose family was at its best about the end of the fifteenth century and beginning of the sixteenth. Jacquemart, therefore, argues that the Japanese imitations would date from the first half of the sixteenth century, and the vitreous enamelled pieces would go back, at least, to the fifteenth. He labors under a very serious mistake, which evidently takes its rise in the assumption that the ware made by the Japanese in the seventh century was translucent pottery, or that Kato-siro-ouye-mon, in the thirteenth century, had acquired the art of making porcelain. We shall handle this subject more in detail when treating of Japan; but meanwhile let it be noted that the Japanese themselves call the thirteenth century ware stone-ware, and that there is no reason for believing that porcelain was made in Japan until near the middle of the sixteenth century, or about the date assigned by Jacquemart to the so-called Japanese imitations of the Rose family of China.