SOUTHERN SONG DYNASTY (1127-1279)

Starting from the early Northern Song dynasty, kilns at Jingdezhen achieved success in producing very fine white-bodied porcelain covered with an illuminous glaze of icy blue tinge, earning the name qingbai, 'blue white', or yingqing, 'shadow blue'. The shape and decorations on qingbai wares were often fashioned after contemporaneous silver wares, and the current meiping is no exception. A silver meiping with ruyi-shaped scrolls, excavated in a Southern Song hoard in Sichuan, for example, was possibly an inspiration for the design of the current vase. The silver vase is illustrated in S. Kwan, 'Tixi wenyang fenqi chuyi', Proceedings of Conference on Ancient Chinese Lacquer, Hong Kong, 2012, p. 65, fig. 11.

Qingbai vases of similar shape and design are in the collection of important museums and institutions.
Compare with a similar example (31.4 cm.) of rounder profile in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, illustrated in Valenstein, A Handbook of Chinese Ceramics, New York, 1989, no. 11. Another qingbai meiping of slightly different proportion is in the Palace Museum, Beijing, illustrated in The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum, Porcelain of the Song Dynasty, part II, Hong Kong, 1996, no. 167, which is very similar to the example (32.1 cm.) sold at Christie’s Hong Kong, 28 May 2014, lot 3233 (fig. 2). A smaller one (24.2 cm.) in the British Museum, London, is illustrated in The World’s Greatest Collections, Oriental Ceramics, vol. 5, 1981, no. 70. Compare also with a smaller meiping and cover (22.5 cm.) without carved decoration from the Songde Tang Collection, sold at Christie’s Hong Kong, 3 December 2021, lot 2812.