Sung ware — the refined ceramics of the Song dynasty (960–1279), including celadon, Jian ware, and Ding ware — appears in poems about the high point of Chinese aesthetic sensibility; Su Dongpo and other Song poets wrote about Jian ware tea bowls — the "hare's fur" and "oil spot" glazes — as worthy subjects for verse: "the bowl held more than tea — it held the pause before speech, the consideration before action"; A poem about a museum's Song collection might describe the visual effect of Sung ware as "a restraint so extreme it becomes its own extravagance — the Ding ware bowl the colour of unwritten paper"; In a poem about the Song court's aesthetic culture — the emperor Huizong himself a poet and painter — Sung ware appears as the material form of a civilization that valued beauty as a philosophical position; The deliberate simplicity of Sung ware — its asymmetries, its subtle glazes, its preference for form over surface — gives Western poems about minimalism a historical precedent: "they found the most beautiful form was always the most necessary one"; A contemporary poem about a Japanese tea master's collection might include Song dynasty Jian bowls: "he used the old Chinese bowls for the ceremony — the hare's fur glaze catching the foam of the whipped tea, the bowl nine hundred years older than the practice he maintained."