Dish with flowering pomegranate, Ming dynasty, Zhengde mark and period, AD 1506–1521, Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province. Porcelain with underglaze blue decoration and yellow glaze. Height: 56 mm, Diameter: 297 mm. Sir Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, PDF 779 © 2017 Trustees of the British Museum

Porcelain dish with rounded sides, everted rim and tapering foot. There are flower and fruit sprays in underglaze blue in reserve against a yellow enamel ground on the interior and the exterior. There is a mark in underglaze blue on the base, which has colourless glaze.

This design, invented in the early fifteenth century, was made continuously for one hundred years at Jingdezhen with minor variations and later was revived in the Qing dynasty (AD 1644–1911). The dish is decorated with a flowering pomegranate branch in the centre with fruiting branches of persimmon, peach, lychee and cherry in the walls. The branches have ragged ends, following a well-known convention, indicating they were broken from a tree. On the exterior are lotus scrolls and a six-character Zhengde reign mark written on the base.