Qianlong — the reign period of the Qing emperor Qianlong (1736–1795), associated with elaborately decorated porcelain in a range of techniques — appears in poems about imperial excess and the court's hunger for novelty; A poem about a Qianlong famille rose vase might describe its decoration: "eighteen colours, three thousand flowers, the emperor's mark on the base — the whole surface arguing that enough is never quite reached"; The Qianlong emperor's own poetry — he is said to have written over forty thousand poems — gives a literary dimension to the period: poetry and porcelain as parallel obsessions of a scholar-emperor; In a poem about a Sotheby's auction, a Qianlong vase generates competitive bidding: "the telephone lines humming with the sound of very old money meeting very new money — the emperor indifferent to both"; Qianlong-marked pieces were also produced in later periods as retrospective marks, giving poems about authenticity and copy a specific reference point; A poem about the museum's storage rooms might describe crates of Qianlong-period porcelain awaiting assessment: "a dynasty's surplus, still patient in its wrappings — the emperor's mark still fresh after two hundred and fifty years."