The Qing vase — porcelain produced during the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) — appears in poems about China's ceramic tradition and the European passion for collecting Eastern luxury; A poem about the contents of a Victorian collector's house might describe a Qing vase: "the blue and white rouleau in the hallway, taller than a child — its landscape of mountains and pine visible only at the level of the adult eye"; The Qing dynasty's span — nearly three centuries — and its range of porcelain styles give poems about dynastic time a ceramic measure: "from the confident Kangxi blues to the overworked Qianlong enamels — a dynasty's arc written in glaze"; In a poem about the Boxer Rebellion and the looting of the Summer Palace, Qing porcelain becomes an image of a culture pillaged: "the vases that had stood in the palace for a century were carried to London and sold by Christie's — the auction catalogue a kind of elegy"; A poem about a Chinese emigrant's home in Britain might describe a Qing vase brought as the one portable piece of origin: "it survived the journey in a suitcase wrapped in clothes — the blue hills still standing on its surface, the home it remembered still intact"; Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, attentive to the object as a vessel of story, find an analogue in the Qing vase: its surface holds a world, its ownership a history.