Much white porcelain, both the Feng-ting and the Fukien, was imported into Europe from the end of the seventeenth century, and it forms an important element in old collections. Some of this white ware, at a later time, was decorated with colours in England and elsewhere, giving rise to a class of porcelain that has caused some confusion to collectors.
In China, white porcelain is used in time of mourning, at least that is the case with that supplied to the imperial court.
Unglazed porcelain is comparatively rare in China, but figures of gods or of animals are sometimes found in biscuit, and the little boxes in which crickets are kept for fighting are generally of unglazed ware. Again, where, as in the class of polychrome glazes, the glaze is applied with a brush, some part may be left unglazed; and this practice has survived in the case of the lions and kilins of the _famille verte_, where we often find the biscuit exposed in parts of the face.
CELADON WARE.--As the white ware of King-te-chen--the _Ting_--has got its name from the town of Ting-chou where it was first made, so the many varieties of celadon[88] porcelain are connected in the Chinese mind with the town of Lung-chuan, near the southern boundary of the province of Chekiang. We have already given some space to this ware, so important from the _cultur-historisch_ point of view, and we shall have to return to it again when we come to investigate the routes by which the porcelain of China passed in the Middle Ages to other countries. Here we will merely call attention to the later revival of the celadon glazes mentioned in a passage we have quoted from the letters of the Jesuit father. But the highly finished porcelain, with a fine white paste covered with a pale greyish-green glaze of uniform thickness and shade, differs much from the old vases with ‘red mouth and foot.’ There is a remarkably fine specimen in the Wallace collection at Hertford House with chased metal mountings of the time of Louis XV., and other pieces similarly mounted in the Jones collection.