CERAMIC ART IN CHINA. 351 



Europe man}- years prior to that date. In New College, Oxford, is 

 still preserved a celadon bowl mounted in silver richly worked, known 

 as "Archbishop Warham's cup" and bequeathed l)y th:it prelate (150-1 

 to 1532) to the college, which was imported into England l)eforc the 

 reign of Henry VIII. Marr3^at, in his history of Porcelain, also men- 

 tions some bowls which were given to Sir Thomas Trenchard by Philip 

 of Austria when, after leaving England to assume the throne of Castile 

 in 1605, he was driven back b}" a storm to We3'mouth and entertained 

 there bj- Sir Thomas. These bowls are said to have been preserved by 

 the Trenchards, and to be of white porcelain decorated with blue under 

 glaze. From M. du Sartel's work we learn that amongst presents sent 

 by the Sultan to Lorenzo de Medici in 1187 were porcelain vases; and 

 that this ware is mentioned about the same time in the maritime laws 

 of Barcelona as one of the articles imported from Egypt. In letters, 

 too, addressed by the Venetian ambassador at the court of Teheran in 

 1171 to his govei'nment frequent mention is made of porcelain; and 

 some decades earlier, in 1110, the Sultan of Babylonia sent three bowls 

 and a dish of Chinese porcelain {Je j^orcelaine de Slnant),^ to Charles 

 VII, King of France, b}^ the hands of a (certain Jean de Village, the 

 agent in that countr}" of a French merchant named Jacques Coeur. 



Nearly three centuries earlier still, mention is made in an Arabian 

 manuscript, known as the Makrizi Manuscript, in the National Librar}'^, 

 Paris, and translated by the Abbe Renaudot, of a service of chinaware, 

 consisting of forty pieces of different kinds, sent wjth other presents 

 to Nur-ed-din, the Kaliph of Syria, b}^ his lieutenant, Saladin (after- 

 wards the hero of the Crusades), soon after hi;^ conquest of Syria, in 

 the year of the Hegira 567 (A. D. 1188). "This," says Mr.' A. W. 

 Franks in the catalogue of his own collection, now in the British 

 Museum, "is the first distinct mention of porcelain out of China," but, 

 in common with other writers on the subject, he refers the date of the 

 present to 1171, though that year appears not to correspond with the 

 Mohammedan date mentioned in the original text. 



From Chinese sources (the Ming-shih^ or History of the Ming- 

 Dynasty, and the Hsi-yang-ch'ao-kung-tien-lu, or Records of Tribute 

 Missions from the West) we learn that the famous eunuch Chengho 

 carried Chinese arms as far as Cejion during the reign of Yunglo (1403 

 to 1125); that under his successor in 1130 the same eunuch and an asso- 

 ciate envoy. Wang Ching-hung, were sent on a mission to Hornmz and 

 sixteen other countries, and that Chengho dispatched some of his sub- 

 ordinates on commercial ventures to Calicut, on the coast of Malabar, 

 and even as far west as Djiddah, the port of Mecca. "En 1131 ou 

 1432," says Heyd,^ "on y vit meme arriver plusieurs jonques chinoises 



^Dii Sartel, Histoire de la Porcelaine Chinoise, p. 28. 



=*Histoire du commerce du Levant, IT, )>. 44.5, quoting Quatremfire'a M^moire sur 

 I'Egypte, II, p. 291. 



