=Stoneware.= Hard pottery which forms the link between porcelain and earthenware. In Chinese products stoneware is used with self-colours applied in the glaze.
=Vases.= All vessels used for drinking cups and goblets, for ointments or perfumes, for holding, carrying, or pouring wine, oil, or water; and similar or varied forms used solely for ornament.
=Willow Pattern.= A popular decoration of Nankin blue services. There are several varieties, but all have the weeping willow.
=Yao-pien.= The Chinese name for splashed, "shot" silk, or variegated glazes.
This book does not pretend to do more than to indicate to the collector the lines on which collections could or should be made, for "Chats on old Oriental China" scarcely imply a scientific treatise. Incidentally one point will lead on to another, but with always this object in view, to send the collector to the museums to train his eye as well as his understanding and to bring him in touch with all that makes for beauty in Oriental porcelain, a porcelain teaming with mythology, having decorations saturated with that mythology, full of emblems of all that concerns the best and highest life of the Chinese, pointing, we may say, to a religion which, although feebly understood in Europe, has been for centuries a real moving factor in the national life of the Oriental peoples. Hence, when we find the earliest European copies framed on Chinese mythology, and birds and flowers and beasts all unknown to the Occidental mind figuring upon vases at Dresden, at Chelsea, or at Sèvres we are struck with the incongruity of the association. All European factories, at the first, strove to imitate that porcelain which had been in existence in China long before history in Europe had begun its accurate chronology.
There are collectors of the European productions who revel in the delights of fine Dresden groups, of marvellous Chelsea or Worcester vases, of Bristol figures and the other magnificent productions of the European factories in earthenware and porcelain, but we may safely say that the collector who takes up the study of Oriental porcelain relegates all these European productions into oblivion, and has only one desire, to secure the best possible specimens from the land of far Cathay.