![]() Which sadly gives lots of images of leaf-shaped bowls! Google translate gave leaf-bowl => リーフボウル Nevertheless, this gave me some excellent techniques to try. Today Google will translate text for you but not images and some of these were photos of newspaper articles. Although I could not read them, I could deduce what was being done by the pictures. I was excited, saved these articles and printed them out. Several others led to newspaper articles allegedly describing the technique. I started to click the links and many connected to museums and historic books, while others led to blogs of people who, like me, wanted to figure it out. () I copied and pasted these symbols into Google and found a lot of information, unfortunately written in Japanese, which I cannot read but, being a visual learner, I decided to click 'Images' and voila-thousands of images of the leaf bowl instantly appeared. Then, while on Facebook, a Japanese woman named Mia Ishiguro (no relation to Munemaro) noticed that I was researching the leaf bowl and having trouble, so she sent me the symbols for 'leaf bowl' in Japanese. Chenghua porcelain is scarce largely as a result of the exacting standards of imperial porcelain manufacture - porcelain that was intended for the imperial household but which had any blemishes or firing faults was destroyed.The quest for the illusive leaf bowl: John Britt describes his search for an ancient technique. The Chenghua period is famed for the quality of its imperial porcelain. Two of the most copied ‘apocryphal’ reign marks hail from the Xuande period (1426-1435) and Chenghua period (1465-1487). These marks were not necessarily intended to fool buyers into thinking they were buying a genuine earlier work of art.įor example, it is not uncommon to find 15th-century Ming dynasty reign marks on Qing dynasty blue and white porcelain made in the Kangxi period (1662-1722). These marks are often referred to in auction catalogue descriptions as ‘apocryphal’ marks. To complicate matters a little, for hundreds of years Chinese artisans copied reign marks from earlier dynasties out of a respect and reverence for these earlier periods. If a piece has a later copied mark, is it an outright fake? This resulted in many porcelain marks simply comprising empty underglaze blue double circles, or the use of auspicious symbols in underglaze blue such as an artemesia leaf, a lingzhi mushroom or the head of a ruyi sceptre. There was a brief time during the Kangxi period in 1667 when the emperor issued an edict forbidding the use of his reign mark on porcelain in case the ceramics were smashed and discarded. The most common marks on porcelain tend to be written in underglaze blue within a double circle. You would not expect to find reign marks on pieces from earlier dynasties. ![]() Imperial reign marks in kaishu, or regular script, began to appear regularly at the beginning of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and continued throughout the subsequent Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Reign marks can make for a handy dating tool, but buyers should beware - there are many faked marks on later copies and forgeries. The first appears on the base of a blue and white jar and the second on the base of a blue and white ‘lanca’ dish. For example, the two six-character reign marks illustrated above left read: Da Ming Jiajing Nian Zhi, ‘Made in the Great Ming dynasty during the reign of the Jiajing Emperor’ (1522-1566) and Da Qing Yongzheng Nian Zhi, translating as ‘Made in the Great Qing dynasty during the reign of the Emperor Yongzheng’ (1723-1735).
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