Stemmed bowl with carnation scroll, Ming dynasty, Xuande mark and period, AD 1426–35, Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province. Porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration. Height: 10,3 cm, Diameter: 9,8 cm. Sir Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, PDF A636 © 2017 Trustees of the British Museum

Stemmed porcelain bowl with rounded body. Form based on ancient bronze dou. Underglaze blue with wide band of scrolling day lilies above petals rising from the base. Lotus roundel in a double circle inside. Horizontal inscription below external mouth rim.

This thickly-potted, globular, 豆 (dou ‘stemmed bowl’) is decorated with a continuous scroll of carnations with distinctive star-like flowers. Originally it would have had a domed cover with a bud-shaped finial. Archaeologists excavated identical stemmed bowls in the Xuande strata at Zhushan in Jingdezhen. Although in the previous Yongle period (AD 1403–24) a four-character reign mark was sometimes used, the development of what became the standardised six-character reign mark began in the Xuande era as the result of direct official supervision and control of the imperial kilns by the court. Horizontal marks are read from right to left with the name of the dynasty, emperor’s reign name and the characters for ‘made in the years of’. Vertical marks are generally read from top to bottom and right to left