Dish. Porcelain with yellow glaze. 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 544 © Trustees of the British Museum

Height: 45 mm. Diameter: 207 mm. Porcelain dish with rounded sides and slightly everted rim. The dish has pale yellow enamel over a plain felspathic glaze, with slight pinkish-brown staining where body is exposed.

This dish is of an extraordinarily rare type. It demonstrates the first ever use of a monochrome yellow glaze at Jingdezhen. Thereafter this colour glaze was used to decorate court porcelain for the remaining some five hundred years of the imperial era in China. Possibly due to technical difficulties or arguably due to taste, very few plain yellow dishes appear to have been made in the early fifteenth century and very few survive today. 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 on the inside and outside walls. The base has a thin clear glaze and reveals a typical early fifteenth century body beneath.

Bibliographic reference: 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

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