Unto Pu, once a man, now a god, before whose snowy statues bow the
myriad populations enrolled in the guilds of the potteries. But the
place of his birth we know not; perhaps the tradition of it may have
been effaced from remembrance by that awful war which in our own day
consumed the lives of twenty millions of the Black-haired Race, and
obliterated from the face of the world even the wonderful City of
Porcelain itself,--the City of King-te-chin, that of old shone like a
jewel of fire in the blue mountain-girdle of Feou-liang.

Before his time indeed the Spirit of the Furnace had being; had issued
from the Infinite Vitality; had become manifest as an emanation of the
Supreme Tao. For Hoang-ti, nearly five thousand years ago, taught men to
make good vessels of baked clay; and in his time all potters had learned
to know the God of Oven-fires, and turned their wheels to the murmuring
of prayer. But Hoang-ti had been gathered unto his fathers for thrice
ten hundred years before that man was born destined by the Master of
Heaven to become the Porcelain-God.

And his divine ghost, ever hovering above the smoking and the toiling of
the potteries, still gives power to the thought of the shaper, grace to
the genius of the designer, luminosity to the touch of the enamellist.
For by his heaven-taught wisdom was the art of porcelain created; by his
inspiration were accomplished all the miracles of Thao-yu, maker of the
_Kia-yu-ki_, and all the marvels made by those who followed after him;--

All the azure porcelains called _You-kouo-thien-tsing_; brilliant as a
mirror, thin as paper of rice, sonorous as the melodious stone _Khing_,
and colored, in obedience to the mandate of the Emperor Chi-tsong, "blue
as the sky is after rain, when viewed through the rifts of the clouds."
These were, indeed, the first of all porcelains, likewise called