Page 28 - Ming Porcelain Auction March 14, 2017 Sotheby's, NYC

26 SOTHEBY’S NEW YORK 14 MARCH 2017 MING: THE INTERVENTION OF IMPERIAL TASTE

1 98 19
1989
specimens are much rarer than contemporary blue-and-white porcelains, which
can only re ect the immense di culty to create specimens, where the glaze
turned out satisfactorily and which therefore were delivered rather than being
destroyed and interred near the kilns (see Hong Kong 1989, op.cit., p. 19).

The importance of white wares is certainly due in part to their relevance in
Tibetan Buddhist rituals, which the Yongle Emperor passionately patronized
and which is re ected in Buddhist shapes such as ‘monk’s cap’ ewers and stem
bowls, as well as probably tens of thousands of porcelain bricks ordered for the
Porcelain Pagoda in Nanjing, of which over 2000 have been unearthed at the
kiln sites. The imperial commissioning of white wares, however, extended well
beyond pieces used in a Buddhist context. Besides foreign shapes, particularly
copied after metal wares from the Islamic lands of the Middle East, and shapes
whose source and usage are still not properly understood, there are wares of
purely Chinese character such as the yuhuchunping or the meiping. Meiping
vases, or jars, since in the Yongle period they were probably still used as wine
containers rather than ower vases, were made in various sizes and despite – or
perhaps exactly because of – their quintessentially Chinese air were not only
popular in China, but also abroad. Fine Yongle examples are preserved in the
Chinese palace collections in Beijing and Taipei as well as in the Safavid and
Ottoman royal collections in Iran and Turkey, but otherwise are very rare.