Note 67 — Chapter VII · THE PORCELAIN OF CHINA—(continued).

It would be a point of special interest to determine the date when these two colours—the pink (used as a ground) and the opaque turquoise blue—were first used in China. Their presence together with the lemon-yellow gives perhaps the first note of a period of decline. There is in the British Museum a bowl and saucer covered on the outside with this rose enamel and bearing this unusual inscription—‘the Sin-chou year occurring again.’ This expression was referred by Franks to the sixty-first year of the reign of Kang-he, when the cyclical year in which his reign began recurred again, an unprecedented fact in Chinese history. In the same collection is a saucer-shaped plate with a pale pink ground with the mark of the period Yung-cheng. But the evidence in favour of a somewhat later date for the fully developed use of the rouge d’or seems to me fairly strong. Dr. Bushell, however, tells me that he has seen other examples where the same inscription is found upon ware decorated with the rouge d’or, and that he accepts the early date (1722) on the Sin-chou plate. I return to this question on page 136.