Dish. Porcelain with transparent and yellow glazes and gilding. Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province 江西省, 景德鎮. Ming dynasty, Yongle period, AD 1403–24. On loan from Sir Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art. PDF 582.  © Trustees of the British Museum

Height: 57 mm. Diameter: 317 mm. Porcelain dish with rounded sides and flattened rim. The dish has yellow enamel over a plain felspathic glaze. There are two gilt lines on the rim, and traces of a third line around the bottom of the well.

This dish is an example of the first ever use of a monochrome yellow glaze at Jingdezhen. Thereafter this colour glaze was used to decorate court porcelain for some five hundred years of the imperial era in China from AD 1403 to AD 1911. Potters fired the dish twice, first at a porcelain temperature of around 1280 to1320 °C and then in a second, lower-temperature firing to vitrify the lead-fluxed, iron-pigmented glaze. It is incredibly rare as it is also gilded. Archaeologists have excavated some white Yongle porcelain from the Jingdezhen kilns with gilding but yellow examples are very rare indeed.

Bibliographic reference: Pierson, Stacey; Barnes, Amy, A Collector's Vision: Ceramics for the Qianlong Emperor, London, School of Oriental and African Studies, Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, 2002

Krahl, Regina; Harrison-Hall, Jessica, Chinese Ceramics: Highlights of the Sir Percival David Collection, London, BMP, 2009

Medley, Margaret, Illustrated Catalogue of Ming and Ch'ing Monochrome in the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, London, University of London, Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, School of Oriental and African Studies, 1973

Scott, Rosemary, Illustrated Catalogue of Ming and Qing Monochrome Wares in the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, London, University of London, Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, School of Oriental and African Studies, 1989