Page 90 - Ming_China_Courts_and_Contacts_1400_1450 Craig lunas

Plate 8.7 A courtly scene in a garden
(detail), left folio of a double-page
frontispiece (recto) illustration from the
Shahnama (Book of Kings) of Abu’l-
Qasim Manur Firdawsi (c. 934–c. 1020),
c. 1444. Shiraz, Iran. Opaque
watercolour, gold and silver on paper,
height 32.7cm, width 22cm. Cleveland
Museum of Art, 1956.10
From Samarqand to Vietnam, imitations in local directly with the personal use of the early Ming emperors.
20
materials are indications of the status of these blue-and- However, the reality may be very different, and perhaps
white materials in non-Chinese court contexts. A Timurid blue-and-white, while ordered for court use, was not actually
example in the Ulugh Beg Observatory Museum in used by the emperor personally at all, and was instead used
Samarqand precisely copies Yongle era designs derived from for palace decoration and distribution to princes, high-
small-format fan or album leaf paintings of a bird on a ranking palace eunuchs and loyal ministers. To support this
flowering branch. Copies made in Vietnam between 1430 idea, I offer three observations: the first on reign marks; the
18
and 1480 can be even closer to the Ming originals, as second on the absence of blue-and-white in direct
demonstrated by the close comparison between a association with the emperor; and the third, visual evidence
Vietnamese bowl decorated with a blue-and-white dragon of the actual use of blue-and-white in the early Ming.
and made in the Red River delta kilns, now in the The first observation is about marks. A legible clerical
Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Chinese Xuande script was used in the Yongle and Xuande eras between 1403
original on which it is based, an example of which is in the and 1435 to mark textiles, bronzes, cloisonné and lacquer
British Museum. 19 wares. An impressive embroidered tangka, measuring over
Given the high status of early Ming blue-and-white three metres in height and more than two metres in width,
porcelain in 15th-century Europe, the Middle East and with a Yongle presentation mark, depicting Rakta Yamari
Southeast Asia, what was the situation in China itself? In and his consort trampling on the Lord of Death, was kept in
popular discourse blue-and-white has been associated the Jokhang (ཇ ོ་ཁང།) Monastery, Lhasa. Bronze ritual objects
21

Plate 8.8 Blue-and-white porcelain
cup, yashou bei 壓手杯. Yongle
mark and period, 1403–24,
Jingdezhen. Height 4.9cm,
diameter 9.2cm. The Palace
Museum, Beijing

80 | Ming China: Courts and Contacts 1400–1450