for South East Asian Muslims rather than those further west. Some dishes show European ships, and represent Western ship's compasses. The designs show awareness of contemporary Jingdezhen porcelain, but at a considerable distance. Smaller numbers of pieces, often undecorated, are in a range of other background colours, especially blues and browns, usually achieved by slips, but also by applying coloured glazes all over. The pieces very often have grit from the kiln on the glaze at the foot, indicating rather careless making. They were fired in dragon kilns of various designs, and the numerous potteries were small concerns, far removed from the industrial scale of Jingdezhen. Pieces were mostly wheel-thrown, but moulds were also used to form pieces. The iconography has peculiarities, including the motif of the "split pagoda" where the central scene "is dominated by what resembles a three storey pagoda split in two vertically by a funnel-like strip reserved in white, almost like a volcanic eruption", which has puzzled scholars; there are a number of suggestions as to its meaning. This is now interpreted by some, including the Percival David Foundation and Victoria and Albert Museum, as "the path to the islands of the Immortals" of Chinese mythology, leaping above the building, while others retain an open mind. This design is one of many where the Chinese characters in "debased" seal script make no sense, reflecting illiterate decorators producing for a market that could not read Chinese. A division of the blue and white wares into three "families" or broad groups has been proposed by Barbara Harrisson: "conservative", "persistent" and "versatile", in chronological order. This classification was further refined by Monique Crick in 2010 into three types of decoration: "Sketchy", "Composed", and "Full "rim-to-rim"". The "Sketchy decoration" group uses "a vigorous, brushed style, painted freehand and spontaneously" by a single artisan. The later groups often use drawing in dark concentrated blue to create the design, which is then overpainted with a lighter wash, in the same style that is often used with black and turquoise in the polychrome enamels. Some of these pieces have visible pin pricks indicating where a stencil was fixed, presumably allowing rapid painting of the wash. The outline would have needed to dry before the wash was applied, suggesting that a number of artisans were involved in different stages of production requiring different levels of skill. The polychrome enamel wares may not have begun