Dish with underglaze blue decoration reserved on a pale yellow enamel ground, Ming dynasty, Xuande mark and period (1426-1435), Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province. Porcelain with underglaze blue decoration and yellow glaze. Height: 5 cm, Diameter: 26 cm. Bequeathed by Francis Edward Howard Paget, 1945,1016.3 © 2017 Trustees of the British Museum

Porcelain dish with underglaze blue decoration reserved on a pale yellow enamel ground. This dish has rounded sides, an everted rim and a low tapering foot cut inwards towards the base. It is decorated with flowering and fruiting plants reserved against a contrasting pale yellow enamel ground. Inside in a medallion is a branch of flowering and budding gardenia and in the cavetto are pomegranates, persimmons, grapes and ribboned lotus. Outside is a continuous scroll of camellias. Underglaze blue double lines emphasize the inner and outer rim, foot and join of foot to dish. In the centre of the base in a double ring is a six-character underglaze blue reign mark of the Xuande emperor. Formerly this dish was broken into two large pieces and riveted together, but now it has been restored using more modern methods. 

A dish of this type was excavated in the Xuande stratum at Zhushan, Jingdezhen, in 1984. Another is in the National Palace Museum, Taipei. From the Xuande period until the Jiajing era this type of dish was made with two basic designs. Xuande, Hongzhi, Zhengde and Jiajing examples are marked on the base with six-character reign marks beneath a blue-tinged glaze. Chenghua examples generally have an unglazed base and are marked by the outer rim with a reign mark in a horizontal line. The blue used to paint the flowers on the Chenghua examples is also much paler. (Harrison-Hall 2001 4:43).