The origin of the legend represented on the willow pattern must
therefore have been of remote antiquity, and the following is the record
of the tradition:
The Mandarin had an only daughter named Li-chi, who fell in love with
Chang, a young man who lived in the island home represented at the
top of the pattern, and who had been her father's secretary. The
father overheard them one day making vows of love under the
orange-tree, and sternly forbade the unequal match; but the lovers
contrived to elope. They lay concealed for a while in the gardener's
cottage, and thence made their escape in a boat to the island-home
of the young lover. The enraged Mandarin pursued them with a whip,
and would have beaten them to death had not the gods rewarded their
fidelity by changing them into turtle-doves.
The picture is called the willow pattern not only because it is a
tale of disastrous love, but because the elopement occurred when the
willow begins to shed its leaves.
Much of the clay at Carclaze was being sent to the Staffordshire
potteries, to be used in the production of the finest porcelain. It was
loaded in ships and taken round the coast via Liverpool to Runcorn, a
port on the River Mersey and the terminus of the Duke of Bridgewater's
Canal, where it was transhipped into small boats, which conveyed it to
the potteries in Staffordshire, involving a carriage of about fifty
miles, After being manufactured into porcelain, it was packed into
crates and again consigned by canal to many places inland and to
Liverpool for shipment abroad, the carriage being cheaper and safer than
if consigned by rail, owing to the fragile nature of the goods.
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