China

Blue-and-White Porcelain: Cobalt on a Court Vase

In 1351 a man named Zhang Wenjin, from Yushan county in Jiangxi, sent a pair of inscribed porcelain vases to a Daoist temple in Xingyuan, today's Wuyuan. The British Museum's Room 95 label treats that dedication as the earliest known date written on blue-and-white ware. The cobalt was already under the glaze. What still sits open is how the same blue left the temple and settled on a high-shouldered court jar painted with a bird that English labels call a phoenix.

A blue-and-white porcelain vase from Jingdezhen is white porcelain painted with cobalt, then covered with a clear glaze and fired hard. The jar English labels call a meiping has a short neck, a small rim, and a body that swells at the shoulder before it tapers to a tight foot.

High shoulders, a tight neck, and cobalt under the glaze

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Cizhou meiping (22.91.2) sets the silhouette. From a short, vertical neck the wall runs in one curve, swells into broad rounded shoulders, then narrows toward a small, round base. The museum notes that vases of this shape have long been known as prunus vases, or meiping, a homonym for "beautiful vessel." Cleveland's Song qingbai example (2017.20) uses the same gloss, plum vase.

Potters painted the porcelain body with cobalt blue and covered the paint with a transparent glaze. The Met's Yuan Bottle with Peony Scroll (26.271.1) is that technique on a meiping-like bottle: Jingdezhen ware, mid-fourteenth century, 44.5 cm high, with cloud-collar at the neck, a peony scroll on the belly, and stylised lotus petals at the foot.

A Met essay on Silk Road ceramics calls the bird on later jars the mythical phoenix known in China as the fenghuang. A Qing tapestry in the same museum (25.109.2) adds that the fenghuang is a distinct species, said to appear only in times of peace and prosperity.

Jingdezhen after 1351

Jingdezhen sits in Jiangxi, near deposits of kaolin. The Met essay treats that clay as the reason Chinese porcelain could fire into a hard, semi-translucent white body. Britannica's Yuan chapter says underglaze cobalt, probably imported from the Middle East, is first visible on fragments from Yangzhou dated to the late eighth or early ninth century. Occasional use continued in the Northern Song. The rapid rise came under the Yuan.

World History Encyclopedia dates those Mongol rulers 1215–1368. The Met and Cleveland print Yuan as 1271–1368. Britannica heads the dynasty 1206–1368 and, in other captions, 1279–1368. The political dates move. By 1351 the David vases prove the technique was already mastered at Jingdezhen. Zhang Wenjin's town, Yushan, lies about 120 km southeast of the kilns. The British Museum now shows the pair in Room 95. Britannica still lists them in the Percival David Foundation.

World History Encyclopedia names the pigment as cobalt oxide from central Asia, particularly Iran. The Met's peony bottle shows the mix: a West Asian layout, a Chinese flower scroll, and lotus petals at the foot.

First wine, then a plum branch

Cleveland is blunt about the job. Jars of this shape first held wine. The plum-vase name comes from a flowering plum branch set in the small opening. A meiping on a palace table is not a ginger jar and not a long-necked bottle.

A ruyi scepter in the Met (2014.202) takes the shape of a fungus and works as a rebus for "as your wish." The pack model is a stylised meiping: a fenghuang in flight among ruyi-head clouds, with pointed lappet bands at shoulder and base.

When the court wanted the blue, and when it did not

Britannica's Ming pages are the turn. After 1368 the Yuan repertoire of blue-and-white continued, but the ware was treated as too vulgar for court use. None of this ware bears an imperial reign mark until the Xuande period, which Britannica dates 1425–35. Yongle (1402–24) had already put reign marks on the finest white porcelain and on copper-red monochrome. By Xuande, crowded Yuan patterns had given way to dragons and floral motifs of clearer line. World History Encyclopedia puts the same shift in the fifteenth century: more white left showing, and birds and flowers in styles popular in landscape painting.

Jingdezhen had the kaolin, petuntse, wood, and water that Britannica lists for the southern kilns. Those imperial kilns were badly run in the Jiajing (1521–67) and Wanli (1572–1620) reigns, yet private shops still turned out lively wares. World History Encyclopedia records porcelain leaving with silk and lacquer. The Met essay follows the same blue into Iznik and Iran. The court vase and the foreign tableware share a pigment, not a job.

The Met's 63.8 cm Wanli phoenix meiping

The clearest single jar to walk around is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Vase in Meiping Shape with Phoenix, object 1979.109, on view in Gallery 204. The museum dates it to the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century and to the Wanli mark and period, printed as 1573–1620. Britannica prints that reign 1572–1620. The one-year slip is a catalog habit, not two emperors.

The vase is Jingdezhen porcelain painted with cobalt blue under a transparent glaze. It stands 63.8 cm high, 34.3 cm at the widest point, with a rim of 7.9 cm and a base of 20.3 cm. Mrs. Eugene L. Garbáty gave it in 1979, in memory of Eugene L. Garbáty. The Met's title is the secure fact about the motif: a phoenix on a meiping, and the jar is Wanli mark and period. The Wildform jar is a stylised meiping of the same family, a phoenix among ruyi-head clouds and pointed lappets, not a 63.8 cm Wanli court piece and not the Yuan peony bottle in the same gallery.

Dates that will not sit still

Cobalt's first century in China is still argued. Britannica starts the pigment on Yangzhou shards of the late eighth or early ninth century, then says only the Yuan made underglaze blue rise fast. Those two statements sit together if the early finds are occasional experiments and the fourteenth century is when Jingdezhen made the palette ordinary.

Reign marks are another trap. World History Encyclopedia notes that adding Ming imperial dates became a habit. One plate on that page is inscribed Xuande and dated 1540–1600. Britannica's marks section is blunter: many reign names were used so loosely that, unless the period is clear by other means, it is safer to set the mark aside. A Xuande line on the base is not, by itself, a Xuande pot. None of these pages gives a surviving count of meiping. The secure core is smaller: Jingdezhen put traded cobalt under a clear glaze; by 1351 the technique was good enough for a named temple gift; Ming courts first resisted the blue and then ordered it.

In your scene

A blue-and-white meiping reads as palace or temple furniture, a closed jar with a small mouth, not a wide ginger pot and not a tall bottle. Keep the high shoulder and the short neck, and let the phoenix sit in a band of clouds rather than wander across a garden plate. For a Chinese court set, see the Chinese Ritual Relics pack.

Sources

All journal articles