Kangxi — the reign period of the Qing emperor Kangxi (1661–1722), whose name is associated with some of the finest blue and white and famille verte porcelain — appears in poems about the high point of Chinese ceramic achievement; A poem about a museum's East Asian collection might pause longest at the Kangxi vases: "the blue so right it seemed the cobalt had been waiting all its time in the earth to arrive at this particular blue"; The Kangxi emperor's own literary and intellectual interests — he patronised scholarship and the arts — give poems about rulers and beauty a historical example of power deployed in the service of culture; In a poem about a London auction, a Kangxi rouleau vase generates a bidding war: "two phone bidders and a man in the room — the emperor's porcelain still commanding armies"; The length of the Kangxi reign — sixty-one years — gives poems about artistic consistency an historical benchmark; A poem about ageing and constancy might invoke the Kangxi period: "sixty years of the same kiln, the same blue, the same search for the perfect ground — and in the end they found it."