Lot 805. An extremely rare doucai 'grapevine' stem cup, Ming dynasty, Wanli period (1573-1620): d. 7.8 cm. Lot Sold 3,048,000 HKD (Estimate 2,000,000 - 4,000,000 HKD) © Sotheby's 2025
 

delicately potted with a shallow rounded cup and gently flared rim, rising elegantly from a hollow splayed stem, the exterior outlined in underglaze blue and filled with soft washes of green, yellow, brown and aubergine enamels, decorated with a grapevine suspending three bunches of grapes and issuing curling tendrils, between double line borders at the rim and foot, the base inscribed with an apocryphal six-character Chenghua reign mark in underglaze blue in a horizontal line.

Provenance: Sotheby's Hong Kong, 7th October 2006, lot 922.
 

Note: The present stem cup is a very rare example of Chenghua-style porcelain and appears to be the only one of its kind in private hands. Only one other museum example is recorded, now preserved in the British Museum (accession no. 1968,0422.43), with a metal-bound rim and formerly in the Sedgwick Collection.

Shen Defu (1578-1642), a notable official, wrote in Wanli ye huo bian [Unofficial Gleanings of the Wanli Era]: "As for porcelain wares, today Chenghua wares are the most highly valued, surpassing those of Xuande [...] Yet, since coming to the capital, I have seen pairs of Chenghua wine cups fetching over a hundred taels of silver, which left me utterly astonished and at a loss for words". In the same period, Gao Lian, a Chinese writer and encyclopedist, recorded in Zunsheng Bajian [Eight Treatises on the Nurturing of Life], published in the nineteenth year of the Wanli reign (1591): "Among the finest Chenghua wares, none surpasses the doucai grapevine cup with a flared rim and flattened body; the form is far superior to the Xuande cup." By the mid-Wanli period, the doucai grapevine stem cup had become the preeminent wine cup, far surpassing the now-well-known chicken cup and earning acclaim as the "finest Chenghua ware".
 

For Chenghua mark and period stem cups of this design, see one preserved in the Beijing Palace Museum (accession no. gu 145656), three in the Taipei Palace Museum (accession nos guci 3545N, 3546N, 3547N), and one in the Sir Percival David Collection in the British Museum (accession no. PDF A779).

 

Sotheby's. Imperial Connoisseurship Treasures of Chinese Art from A Prestigious Collection, Hong Kong, 21 November 2025