Though the word is French, cloisonné refers to a form of decorative art usually associated with China or Japan, although it probably originated in Turkey or ancient Mesopotamia. In cloisonné, copper filaments are glued or soldered to a metal surface—gold in the Near East, bronze or copper in China—to create tiny compartments, or cloisons, that are then filled with ground glass blended with metallic oxides to produce colorful enamels. For example, cobalt produces a blue hue, iron turns red or brown, manganese oxide goes to purple, uranium oxide produces orange, tin makes things white, and copper can result in a range of greens, blues, or reds, depending on how much oxidization occurs when it's being fired. When the cloisonné object—be it a vase, sword guard (tsuba), or piece of architectural hardware such as a door knob—is being fired, it is filled and refilled with enamel and fired multiple times to account for the shrinkage of the enamel as the object is heated to almost 1,500 degrees. After the enameling phase is deemed complete, the object is polished until smooth to the touch. Sometimes exposed cloisons are gilded before the entire piece is covered with clear lacquer as a final step. Chinese cloisonné first appeared in the early 15th century during the Ming dynasty. The technique did not become popular in Japan until the late 16th century. One of the distinctive elements of Japanese cloisonné is the delicacy of the wire used to separate the enamel colors. Indeed, by the late 19th century, some examples of Japanese cloisonné lacked wires entirely. A close cousin of Japanese cloisonné is a technique called moriage, which was popularized by the Ando Company of Nagoya in the early 20th century. Like cloisonné, moriage is made from fired layers of enamel, but the layers are built up to give the color in a given cloison depth and dimension rather than opacity. In Europe, the roots of cloisonné go back even further to the Greek and Roman empires. French artisans referred their precursor of cloisonné as champlevé. In this technique, the cloisons were created by engraving or carving channels and negative spaces into the object to be decorated. As with cloisonné, these spaces were filled with enamels, fired, filled and fired again as necessary, and then polished. When cloisonné finally found its way to China prior to its flowering in the 15th century, the form was initially derided as garish and even vulgar by Chinese artisans. But once those artisans perfected the technique, and then married it with traditional shapes found in Chinese bronzes, Chinese cloisonné came into its own. Not surprisingly, the iconography was also traditional, including dragons, landscapes, and lotus blossoms. In addition, Chinese cloisonné appeared roughly concurrently with a type of Chinese pottery called fahua, in which ceramic slip rather than copper was used to create cloisons that were filled with glazes before being fired in a kiln.