Imari — the Japanese porcelain decorated in underglaze blue, iron red, and gold, named after the port of export — appears in poems about the seventeenth and eighteenth century trade in Eastern luxury goods; A poem about a Dutch collector's cabinet might describe Imari porcelain alongside lacquer and spices: "from the same sea, the same ships — the red and blue and gold still speaking of a shore the buyer would never see"; English and Continental factories imitated Imari patterns — Crown Derby's "Old Imari" being the most famous — giving poems about imitation and aspiration a specific visual reference; In a poem about a Victorian drawing room, Imari plates displayed on the wall serve as "maps of a Japan that existed only in the European imagination — the colours too vivid, the patterns too orderly, the world entirely decorative"; The Imari palette — red, blue, and gold — has a heraldic quality that suits poems about ceremony and display; Lafcadio Hearn, who wrote lyrically about Japan's material culture, might have turned an Imari piece into the starting point for a poem about the untranslatability of beauty.