Lot 114. A rare inscribed blue-glazed dish, 17th century. Diameter 5 3/4  in., 14.7 cm. Estimate 30,000 — 50,000 USD. Lot sold 87,500 USD. © Sotheby's.

the gently rounded sides rising from a recessed base, covered overall with a thick deep blue glaze suffused with a subtle network of fine dark crackles, the rim and base dressed in brown, later inscribed around the interior of the countersunk base with a poem eulogizing Guan wares from the Xiuneisi kiln, accompanied by an inscription reading Qianlong gengxu qinghe yuti ('composed by the Qianlong emperor in the fourth month of the cyclical year gengxu'), followed by a two-character seal reading guxiang ('scent of archaism'), wood stand (2) 

Provenance: Yamanaka & Co., Chicago, 1st November 1937.
Collection of Stephen Junkunc, III (d. 1978).

Note: Compare a 17th century blue-glazed bowl, with a later-inscribed imperial poem composed by the Qianlong emperor in the second spring month of the bingshen cyclical year, corresponding to 1776, in the Percival David Collection, now in the British Museum, London, illustrated in Stacey Pierson and Amy Barnes, A Collector's Vision: Ceramics for the Qianlong Emperor, London, 2002, pl. 86. 

A bowl of closely related form and size with a similar crackled blue glaze to the exterior but a celadon glaze to the interior, attributed to circa 1640-1650, is illustrated in Sir Michael Butler, Margaret Medley, and Stephen Little, Seventeenth-Century Chinese Porcelain from the Butler Family Collection, Alexandria, VA, 1990, pl. 73.