The japanned tray — lacquered in imitation of East Asian lacquerwork, typically black with gilded chinoiserie decoration — appears in poems about eighteenth-century England's passion for Eastern aesthetics translated into domestic objects; A poem about a Georgian tea ceremony might describe the japanned tray: "the black ground, the gold pagodas, the painted birds that knew nothing of China but lived there nonetheless"; The technique of japanning — European craftsmen imitating a process they could not fully replicate — gives poems about cultural appropriation and aesthetic longing a material form; In a poem about a butler's pantry, the japanned tray is brought out for company: "wiped clean, the gilding checked for chips — the Eastern fantasy restored to its function as a surface for cups and silver"; Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill and its chinoiserie contents might include a japanned tray: the Gothic imagination's equivalent in the oriental mode; A poem about a house clearance might describe a japanned tray leaning against the wall: "the gold pavilions still standing on their black ground — a country that outlasted the house it served."