An important large inscribed blue and white 'peach' meiping, Ming dynasty, Yongle period

French Private Collection.

Acquired in Paris, 2020.

China’s Beloved Peach Tree

Regina Krahl

Meiping vases are among the most impressive ceramics fashioned by Chinese potters in the early Ming period (1368–1644), and the fruit and flower motifs of that time are, arguably, the most satisfactory and enchanting cobalt-blue paintings ever done on white porcelain. The present vessel belongs to a rare group of pieces from a brief, exceptional period, when the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province lavished the most careful attention on every aspect of their artefacts and created true works of art – a short moment in the history of Chinese porcelain, superseded by a period of greater productivity, when motifs were simplified and brush work became more mechanical.

Under the patronage of the Yongle Emperor (r. 1403–1424) the imperial porcelain kilns underwent a phenomenal uplift in every respect. The porcelain body, glazes and pigments used for decoration were all refined to an unprecedented level, acquiring the pleasing softness of luxurious materials. The technical advances achieved by the potters were matched by artistic innovation. New designs and styles were developed, both for shapes and ornamentation, and existing ones were improved in sophisticated ways. Blueprints were probably provided directly by the court for potters and painters to follow. New rigorous standards of quality control eliminated great quantities of the kilns’ output, so that anything that passed was of very high standard. 

Many shapes, including that of the meiping, were not new, but Yongle vessels are unsurpassed in their proportions, adapted with an unerring sense for harmonious silhouettes. With its voluptuous shape, with a wide swelling shoulder, small waisted neck with a distinct lip, faint flare towards the base, and of course its large size – among the largest of these early Ming meiping – this grand vessel has a majestic presence.

The most important stylistic novelty of the decoration is a turn towards a more naturalistic manner of painting, noticeable particularly with fruiting and flowering plant motifs. What on the present vase may at first glance look just like a decorative peach motif, at a closer look turns out to be a naturalistic image of a living tree. Its two main branches extending around the sides of the vessel, one bent towards the left, the other to the right, are each weighed down by a cluster of three heavy fruits and are sprouting many blossoms and buds, with the tip of one branch overhanging the other on the vessel’s reverse. It makes us rotate the vase to follow the growth of the tree and to view its different aspects, which change with every turn. To convey unmistakably that this is a proper fruit tree firmly planted in the earth, a scant, almost symbolic patch of soil was depicted under the tree – a feature that is specific to this period.

This peculiarity of depicting trees or other large plants with some of the ground from which they are growing had its origins in the Hongwu period (1368–1398), became a characteristic of the Yongle reign and disappeared in the Xuande period (1426–1435). A dish excavated from the Hongwu stratum of the imperial kiln site at Zhushan, Jingdezhen, is illustrated in Jingdezhen chutu Ming chu guanyao ciqi/Imperial Hongwu and Yongle Porcelain Excavated at Jingdezhen, Chang Foundation, Taipei, 1996, pl. 21; dishes from the Yongle stratum, depicting a lotus plant, a lychee tree, a melon plant, and a grape vine, respectively, all with this feature, are published ibid., pls 41, 45, 46 and 51. The few lines under the lotus are indicating water rather than earth, and the patch from which the grape is growing is probably intended as a vertical surface, but the basic idea in all examples is the same, to depict a live plant rather than a decorative motif composed of selected parts of a plant. The feature does not seem to appear in the Xuande stratum at Jingdezhen, but is known from a dish in the Capital Museum, Beijing, painted with a crab-apple tree, that bears a Xuande reign mark. With its exceptionally large size, otherwise found only on Yongle chargers made for export to the Middle East, it must date from very early in the period; see Shoudu Bowuguan cang ci xuan [Selection of porcelains from the Capital Museum], Beijing, 1991, pl. 100.

While fruiting plants in general were motifs dear to Jingdezhen’s painters in the early Ming period, the peach tree is a particularly beloved motif in China. Peach blossoms and fruit were associated with beauty and marriage already in a poem included in the Shijing (Classic of Poetry) from the first millennium BC, and evoked realms of peace and happiness ever since Tao Yuanming’s fifth-century story of a fisherman accidentally entering a grove of peach trees that led him to a blessed land. As these symbolisms were taken up endlessly in Chinese poetry and painting, such associations were ever present in any image of a peach tree.

The decoration of this vase is, however, not only remarkable for its peach tree, but also for its carefully devised supporting borders. The finely painted chrysanthemum scroll with its three pairs of blooms among buds and leaves is given the same attention as a main motif; and the stylish foliate scroll around the shoulder with its elegant swerve and its complex system of knobs and hooks provides the vessel with yet another striking aspect, when viewed from the top. It is particularly remarkable for employing multiple shades of blue, like the rest of the design, which make it stand out as if in relief. On the majority of early Ming meiping, these borders are reduced to repetitive petal panels, stiff leaves, or small detached flower sprays, and where a scroll border is used, it tends to be much simplified.

There appear to be only two other meiping with the same design, both with the cobalt blue much less well controlled, suggesting production in an earlier rather than later decade in the fifteenth century for the whole group. One vase, in the Palace Museum, Taipei (gu ci 002640, 34.4 cm high), with very dark ‘heaping and piling’ and somewhat blurred lines, is illustrated in Liao Pao Show, ed., Mingdai Xuande guanyao jinghua tezhan tulu/Catalogue of the Special Exhibition of Selected Hsüan-te Imperial Porcelains of the Ming Dynasty, National Palace Museum, Taipei, 1998, pl. 33 (fig. 1); the other in the Palace Museum, Beijing (xin 00062693), with rather rough, blurry cobalt painting, is published with a cover in Geng Baochang, ed., Gugong Bowuyuan cang wenwu zhenpin quanji. Qinghua youlihong/The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum. Blue and White Porcelain with Underglazed Red, Shanghai, 2000, vol. 1, pl. 84 (image reversed); this is probably the meiping illustrated without a cover in Sun Yingzhou, ‘Wo dui zaoqi qinghua yuanliao de chubu kanfa [My initial thoughts on early blue-and-white raw materials]’, Wenwu, 1959, no. 11, fig. 2. Since the cover is of a common, not a specific design, it is not clear whether it belongs.

In their complex designs, these vases with a peach tree are closely linked to a small group of outstanding Yongle meiping of similarly large size and quality, and likewise painted with spectacular, naturalistic designs that extend all around the vessel, and with elaborate borders. Three designs in particular come to mind here: one is seen on a meiping (33.5 cm) in the British Museum, London, painted on either side with a bird on a flowering branch among bamboo, between a complex geometric band above and a scroll of roses below, illustrated in Jessica Harrison-Hall, Catalogue of Late Yuan and Ming Ceramics in the British Museum, London, 2001, pl. 3: 19. Another design, known from four extant examples, shows flowering peach branches and bamboo enclosed between a cloud collar with small flowers above and a lingzhi scroll below; for an example in the Palace Museum, Beijing (36.7 cm) see Geng Baochang, ed., Gugong Bowuyuan cang Ming chu qinghua ci [Early Ming blue-and-white porcelain in the Palace Museum], Beijing, 2002, vol. 1, pl. 13. The third design, also known from four examples, depicts banana plants, bamboo and rocks, matched with more formal borders of a cloud collar and petal panels filled with flowers; an example in the Palace Museum is illustrated ibid., pl. 14.

A fourth related design, known from three examples, has similar borders as the last, but individual fruit sprays as its main decoration, see ibid., pl. 15, for a Palace Museum example. These smaller, detached fruit motifs did not require the same planning of the complete space around the vase as did the decoration of the present vase and those mentioned above, which were composed like a painting on a handscroll. How successful a painting the present peach-tree design makes, can be seen on a 360-degree image taken of the Taipei companion vase, see Liao Pao Show, op.cit., p. 120.

More common than these fine Yongle vessels is a type of early Ming meiping with simpler designs. Vases with a reduced version of the latter fruit-spray design between borders of petal panels and stiff leaves were produced in much larger quantities and various sizes; an example of similar size as the present vase, from the estate of Laurance S. Rockefeller, was sold in our New York rooms, 21st/22nd September 2005, lot 64 (US $3.5 million). These simpler versions appear to have been destined largely as imperial tributes to foreign courts, where larger numbers were required; ten examples of this pattern survived in the Safavid and Ottoman royal collections in Tehran and Istanbul, besides other meiping with less demanding designs.

The examples with more painterly decoration, such as the present vase, typically seem to have remained in China. Besides a number of pieces preserved in the palace collections, several examples were discovered in royal and aristocratic Ming tombs, whereby the tombs generally date from a later period than the vases. This means that these vessels had been in use for generations and represented priced possessions before they eventually were sacrificed for burial with a notable individual. One Yongle meiping painted with peach blossoms and bamboo, for example, was discovered in the tomb of Zhu Youyun, Prince Jing of Yong (1481–1507), eighth son of the Chenghua Emperor (r. 1465–1487), at Shijingshan district, Beijing, placed there about a century after it had been made, see Shoudu Bowuguan cang ci xuan, op.cit., pl. 92. The inscription on the present piece suggests a similar history.

The two companion pieces to this vase in the Palace Museums of Taipei and Beijing have both been attributed to the Xuande period by the respective museum experts, although all the other comparable meiping mentioned above were attributed to the Yongle reign. While Xuande pieces generally bear a reign mark, it is of course not compelling that all unmarked early Ming porcelains must date from the Yongle period. It is in any case unlikely that styles changed abruptly with the beginning of a new reign. However, in terms of material, form, motifs and painting style, the present meiping would seem to match the characteristics of Yongle period blue-and-white so perfectly, that this attribution would seem the most likely.