Famille rose — the Chinese export porcelain palette using an opaque pink enamel derived from colloidal gold — appears in poems about Sino-European trade and the translation of colour across cultures; The warm, opaque pink of famille rose, unlike anything in earlier Chinese palettes, was introduced via European influence — giving poems about the exchange of ideas between East and West a literal, ceramic dimension; A poem about a Qing dynasty porcelain collection might contrast famille rose's warmth with famille verte's cooler brilliance: "one spoke of spring, one of summer — both equally translated, equally foreign to the hand that painted them"; In a Victorian poem about a drawing room mantelpiece, a pair of famille rose vases stands symmetrically, their pink medallions repeating like a decoration from a dream; The labour involved in famille rose enamelling — multiple firings, each colour applied separately — gives poets an image of painstaking beauty: "so many kilns to arrive at a single blush"; Elizabeth Bishop's eye for the precise and the slightly uncanny might have lingered on famille rose: the colour of European roses rendered in Chinese porcelain for European tables, and yet belonging fully to neither world.