Ceramics in daily life at the Qing court

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1998 by Rosemary E. Scott

While fine quality wares always have been expensive and beyond the reach of the poor strata of society, ceramic vessels have been more widely used in China than elsewhere. It is noteworthy that the so-called Lennard cup in the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art in London [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE III OMITTED] is of a quality that would have been regarded as rather ordinary in China, where it was made in the sixteenth century. When the bowl arrived in Elizabethan London, however, it was so highly prized that its owner, Samuel Lennard, expended a considerable amount of money having fine silver-gilt mounts made for it. These mounts bear hallmarks indicating that they were made by a London goldsmith in 1569/70. Europeans at that time did not even know what porcelain was made of. To them this modest little bowl was, literally, marvelous.

During the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), while porcelain was not ranked as highly as jade or precious metals, it was used for all manner of items by the court and the Qing elite. Enough of these wares are extant to give us a fairly accurate impression of the use of ceramic wares at the court. Documentary evidence has also survived, providing among other things, evidence of personal involvement by individual emperors in the choice of shapes, colors, and motifs of the pieces made for the court. An exhibition of objects from the Percival David Foundation currently displayed at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, includes an eclectic group of pieces that provide some insights into the customs and preoccupations of the upper echelons of Qing society.

Vases of many shapes, sizes, and decorative styles were made for daily use in palaces, as well as, in less exalted surroundings. One particularly fine example in the David Foundation collection [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE I OMITTED] is decorated in overglaze enamels in the falangcai style. This style is more commonly known in the West as guyuexuan, and denotes porcelains with very finely painted enamel decoration and calligraphic inscriptions, which are believed by most scholars to have been applied in the imperial ateliers in Beijing. This vase is decorated with a design of rocks, bamboo, and roses in a landscape. The rocks have been painted using a variety of colors, while the roses have been painted with only one shade of translucent pink enamel. The style of painting used on the roses was only possible because of major technological developments in enamel-making, which enabled the production of the pink, which is based on colloidal gold, and the production of enamels that did not flow when fired. These stable enamels permitted the ceramic decorator to achieve various densities of the same shade by applying the enamel in different thicknesses. The decorator was also able to reserve the outlines of the flower petals rather than painting them in a contrasting enamel color, as on the the small vase in Plate II.

The vases in Plates I and II would have been displayed either on carved wood stands or on pieces of furniture, but flower vases were also made with flat hacks that allowed them to be hung on a wall. These had been popular since the sixteenth century, when they were among the items mentioned in surviving records of Ming dynasty court orders. In the Qing period hanging vases were produced in an even greater range of sizes and shapes with decoration in a variety of techniques. A particularly interesting example is seen in Plate VII. Small vases such as this were called jiaoping and were made to hang in sedan chairs. - in this case, in an imperial sedan chair. We know this because, in addition to bearing an imperial reign mark, there is an inscription on the panel on the front of the vase that may be translated as:

Guan wares and those of Ruzhou are famous classes [of ceramics], Yet the shapes of the new wares are even more admirable. This hanging vase inspires the traveller both to sing, And to gather flowers by the wayside. A sedan chair is indeed a suitable place for it to be hung, As over its side wild flowers incline so appropriately. The red dust [of the mortal world] is barred from entrance, But fragrance can penetrate the gauze of the window blind. Composed by the Emperor in the Qianlong period and inscribed by his order.

The text of the poem was written by the emperor in 1742.(1)

It is probable that the vase is one of the sedan chair vases mentioned by the famous Tang Ying, who was the director of the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Province from 1736 to 1756. In a memorial dated the seventh year of Qianlong (1742), Tang Ying referred to the fact that he had been given the poem with instructions from the emperor to inscribe it on a sedan chair vase. He informed the throne:

Your obedient servant has had the poem inscribed in four different styles of calligraphy on vases of four appropriately different shapes so as to avoid duplication. A preliminary batch of six pairs is respectfully submitted for Your Majesty's viewing.(2)