Well balanced, and modelled after the Kien Lung designs, but probably made later. The color effect is sprightly] Just when or at what stage of Chinese religious culture the dragon came into Chinese art we probably do not know; but it is found in the earliest rugs we have trace of. In these, however, it shares the prevailing simplicity, is strictly conventional in character, usually laid in blue and worked into the shape of a circular medallion, or sometimes, in conjunction with the fret, into corner devices. These, however, seem to have been appropriated from the Persian along with the central medallion. [Illustration: MAT OF A VERY EARLY PERIOD The purest of designs in gold and brown] As time and the art progressed there crept into the design a greater opulence, a higher degree of elaboration. Something of the floral richness of Persia was absorbed, and it abides to this day; but everything adopted was transformed, in color and treatment, to fit into the Chinese decorative scheme. Instead of a profuse mass of floral material, one flower was taken as a motive and presented in repeating fashion, duly emphasized, and with no multiplicity of other floral factors to detract from it. In almost every case the flower had an ethical or religious meaning which became the keynote of the rug. In this connection it may be said that there is no art in the world in which so great a part of the prevailing figures has a generally recognized symbolic meaning. CHINESE SYMBOLISM Very comprehensive is this symbolism. It includes not alone a multitude of things from the floral and animal kingdoms, but even certain utensils had a meaning; social, ethical, or moral, if not religious. The bat, the bird, the butterfly, the dragon, the kylin, the Foo dog, the leopard, the elephant, the horse, the phœnix, the stork,--the list is altogether too long to permit of any thorough tabulation. The old symbols of primitive religion, found in Turanian rugs and dating back to the very morning of mankind, do not seem to appear in the Chinese weavings; but it is manifest that somewhere, at some time, the Chinese symbols and their attendant meanings were derived directly from some imaginative form of nature worship (witness the cotyledon or seed germ, which was adopted by Persia from China and appears so often in the high-school Persian rugs of Sefavian times). The meanings, once established, have been maintained in popular understanding. Every intelligent Chinaman today knows them as his remote ancestors did. It is a part of the great fund of popular information that bird, bat, deer, and butterfly convey wishes for long life and good fortune. [Illustration: ONE OF THE OLDEST AND FINEST EXAMPLES OF CHINESE RUGS The dragons at the center and the corners are in marvellous blue on a background of pure gold. The “tiger” marks are in brown]