This object belongs to the long argument about Chinese porcelain: a blue-and-white porcelain body, thrown, glazed and fired until the surface turns to glass. the Han workshop that made it treated whiteness and colour as a single problem to be solved in the kiln.
What looks like decoration is also a record. The motif was chosen, not incidental, and on a court vessel a repeat pattern is a way of saying order without using words.
Han objects carried the vocabulary of an empire learning to picture its own order in bronze and jade.
A object like this outlived the hands that made it. It is why a blue-and-white porcelain vessel from the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) still reads as a small piece of statecraft, fired and then forgotten by everyone but the collector.
Object details
| Name | Blue and white Arhat furnace (青花罗汉图炉) |
|---|---|
| Artefact no. | |
| Technique | Blue-and-white porcelain (青花) |
| Period | Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) |
| Collection | The Palace Museum, Beijing |
| Source | Palace Museum Digital Collection (数字文物库) |
Image © The Palace Museum. View the original in the Palace Museum Digital Collection.