Dishes of this quality with the design of phoenix in anhua are very rare in the Yongle period. The two phoenixes are male and female, feng and huang, as differentiated by their tails, one with long streaming tail feathers and the other with a scrolled tail. A. D. Brankston in Early Ming Wares of Chingtechen, Hong Kong, 1982, fig. 6, illustrates a line drawing of a detail from a similar dish, showing a phoenix with a feathery tail and the distinctive 'S'-shaped ribbon of clouds.

A dish of identical design but of a smaller size (16.5 cm. diam.) was included in The British Council Exhibition of Chinese Art, The National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1944, illustrated in the Catalogue, no. 176, and subsequently sold at Sotheby's London, 8 December 1992, lot 233.

Otherwise, no other dish of this exact design appears to be published, although there are several dishes recorded with variations in the decoration. For the prototype of the Yongle dish, cf. the Yuan dynasty white-glazed dish with moulded decoration of a pair of phoenix and 'S'-shaped clouds, from the Percival David Foundation, London, illustrated in Oriental Ceramics, Kodansha Series, vol. 6, Tokyo, 1982, pl. 22. A comparable 15th-century dish with phoenix and lotus, from the Norton and H. M. Knight Collections, was sold at Sotheby's London, 11 December 1979, lot 312. There are also a small number of anhua-decorated dishes with dragons in the cavetto encircling the reign mark in the centre. Examples include one sold in these Rooms, 31 October 2000, lot 859; and another from the F. M. Mayer collection, illustrated by R. Krahl, Chinese Ceramics from the Meiyintang Collection, vol. 2, London, 1994, fig. 647.