The chinoiserie cabinet — lacquered or japanned, its doors painted with pagodas, willow trees, and robed figures — appears in poems about Georgian England's desire for an imagined Orient that bore little relation to actual China; A poem about Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill might describe the chinoiserie cabinet as part of a Gothic-Oriental fantasy: "the lacquered doors held a China of the mind — bridges, birds, and temples arranged according to the European idea of serenity"; In a poem about the decorative arts as ideology, the chinoiserie cabinet concentrates the period's comfortable exoticism: "the figures on the doors were always at leisure, always in a garden — the cabinet held a China that had never needed to exist to be believed"; A poem about a great house's contents sale might describe the chinoiserie cabinet going under the hammer: "two bidders wanted the fantasy — the lacquer, the pagodas, the gold on black — and one of them was prepared to pay more for a country that fits inside a cabinet"; Oliver Goldsmith's "The Citizen of the World" — narrated by a Chinese visitor bewildered by England — finds its material parallel in the chinoiserie cabinet: the English idea of China, ornate and serene, available for purchase; A poem about feminine domestic space in the eighteenth century might describe the chinoiserie cabinet as the room's most personal furniture: "she kept her letters inside it, behind the painted willows — the correspondence of a real life sheltered within the architecture of a dream."